deshita | y.ji

eight.

Relief broke through Jeongin's face when he found you sitting inside a coffee house just down the street. He almost missed you through the window. Thank god he didn't overestimate your ability to create your own little heartbreak world and assumed you would choose to wallow in the rain for dramatic purposes rather than find a place to hide from it.

The first thing he had done when he approached your table was to scold you, partly because you had the audacity to ask him to pay for the parfait you ordered knowing you got not a single penny in your pocket. He paid for it at the cashier and went back to the table to scold you, but then he stopped when he seemed to have made you cry just by mentioning Hyunjin's name.

He had sworn you looked fine. You were stuffing your mouth with ice cream and fruit, all innocent and content as your body jittered to a happy rhythm. But as soon as he talked about Hyunjin, your face became stuffy and pouty, and you were whimpering about seeing him hand-in-hand with another girl, kissing and laughing as they marched down the street like nobody was watching them.

It was Jeongin's unsolicited aggressiveness when he hissed at you for being reckless and for making him worry, paired up with the fact that the parfait was your first step to recovering from your first indirect rejection, that made the pity tears fall. And Jeongin realized he had read you wrong; he has been doing an awful lot of those lately, it seemed. His moving away was messing with his head. It was as if his mind was trying to detach from you, and maybe that would be the better thing than to let the closeness linger.

Being away from you would break him, inside and out. His mind was trying to heal him before the damage could be done.

Anyway, long story short and very expectedly, Jeongin went soft over your baby tears. His hissing voice left within a blink of his eyes and he reached out to roughly wipe the droplets away with his thumb, leaning over the table and frowning boyishly. The kind where his eyes were so attentive and kind that they made you feel seen and special, and it was mysteriously alluring.

Then, after the coffee house came the shopping mall, which he had promised you yesterday that he would spend time with you in so you two could shop around. You two did not do much other than window shopping with drinks in your hands, chatting the day away, and distracting you from what you saw under the rain, which arguably was a lot of things done between two friends, you would say.

What happened in the shopping mall was not the most important part of the day for Jeongin, nor was it for you. What happened under the rain where you found out Hyunjin's heart was already occupied by somebody else was, unsurprisingly, also not the highlight of your day. It was not about the coffee house either, where Jeongin watched with affection in his eyes as you ate away the parfait he paid for. What mattered was what happened at the apartment, at the front door.

What happened was that you kissed him, and the problem with that was that he kissed you back.

You two headed back home after spending dinner together. Jeongin figured it would be good to console you once more before you two went back to your home. It was a kind-hearted, naive moment where you two stood face-to-face. He was spilling warm words out of his upturned lips, with a smile so gentle that it made you shiver and with eyes that were illuminated by the golden sun setting on the other side of the sky. And you felt an error in your head, something wrong, something restricting, something weird.

He looked and talked as if he was deeply in love with you, and your broken heart needed exactly a boy like that for its mending, so you did the tragic unthinkable, you did the worst. It was an impulsive decision, but it was also deeply calculated to make yourself feel better, as well as the heat of the moment where you yearned for someone that made you reach out for your best friend's jaw and press your lips against his.

The crazy thing was that you didn't even think Hyunjin indirectly hurt you that much. You were pretty much over him by the time Jeongin started cracking jokes about a figurine store in the mall. If anything, you were more hung up about the fact that nobody may ever love you, that if your first love went to hell the rest would follow too.

Jeongin knew that. He knew that you were not in love with him, he knew that you only kissed him because you got rejected. There was not a single glimmer of hope within him when he felt your lips against his that he thought maybe you came around after all these years. But how could he not cave in? How could he not be so dumb as to throw away logic and facts, to allow himself to choose this brief moment of heaven over the hell that was tomorrow when the truth would be let out?

Because you! Oh, you! You, and your heart, and your whole being, and mostly your lips! They were something he has only dared to look at before, they were something he has only dreamed about before, and he has it close to him now! You were kissing him, hard and desperate, perfectly and messily!

He has never felt joy like this before as he cradled your face in his hands gently and kissed you back. Your lips moved together, and your hasty breathing mixed together. He could feel the bridge of your nose with his own, he could grip the base of your neck and feel the rapid beats of your heart. You circled your arms over his neck and pulled him closer, so close that your bodies were painted together and there was not a gap anything could fit in between.

You hit him, like ecstasy, like the sirens from across the street, like the golden showers that cascade the walls of the apartment complex. He was captured in the heat of your sweet lips, and the pair of hands that threaded through his hair gingerly would not give his heart a breather. It wasn't all pure love at this point. There were longing, lust, and some form of aggression shown in the urgency of how he lifted you up just to kiss you better.

He could kiss you all day. If only you would let him. If only you, in your heart of hearts, wanted him to.

Your frightened and guilty eyes slammed a brick over his head after you two pulled away. Jeongin's heart winced and sobbed over the gradual fall of your hands in his hair, no longer tugging at him as if you wanted him, which you never truly did. The moment of weakness in his eyes—a flash of tenderness, a dazed love, a riptide of affection that slashed across his eyes the second you two pulled away did not go unnoticed by you, unfortunately.

You stared at him as if he was a stranger, unknown and foreign to you, not only because you had just used him to your benefit, but because he was willing to let you use him to your liking.

That could only mean one thing to a boy as calm and logical as Jeongin. He, your childhood best friend, was in love with you, he has been for a long time, and he knew that you weren't in love with him.

So, when your tensed face relaxed and you stayed close to him, for no other reason but to further use him for your own sake, he chose not to lean in and kiss you again.