before & after ‣ 엔하이픈

003 ; past

flashback to the summer
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AERI

"What are you doing back here?" Aeri asked Jake as soon as she takes a seat next to him in the convenience store. "I don't recall ever seeing you go here two nights in a row."

Jake merely chuckled at the ever brazen queen bee. "I don't know. I just suddenly had the urge to go here in the middle of the night and hope to find the queen bee herself here."

Aeri snorts, hearing the incredulous nickname once more. Never has she been called that to her face, only behind her back and even that she didn't appreciate. She opens the bag of chips she bought prior to the conversation she was about to have with Jake.

"What are you doing here two nights in a row?" Jake segued the conversation to another topic where the limelight was no longer on him but on her.

"I'm always out in the night. When I'm too lazy to particularly go anywhere, I go here to just eat and watch. It quiets my head when I do this." Aeri smiles as she briefly glances at him then back to the glass wall that allowed her a view of the world in the night.

"What could your head be possibly noisy about?"

There was a lot of noise in Aeri's head. Many of which involved the dysfunctional family clawing her from behind.

Aeri was the youngest daughter of a beautiful mother and a rich father. If time had a little been kinder to the girl, she was sure she would've had the perfect life but when her father died due to a heart disease, the seemingly ideal image of a life dissipated. Her father's death wasn't really supposed to plummet them into a state of life where they were forced to live check by check, at least not instantly. A huge sum of money was left to both Aeri and her brother, and due to the fact that she was a baby back then and her brother was merely a toddler, their mother took control of most of it.

By the time they were both old enough to know about their inheritance, most of it had already been spent by their mother and while the sum left wasn't by all means small, it was still nowhere near half of what their father originally left them. Ever since then, her brother handled everything, to putting Aeri in school and paying for the utilities, all this he shouldered.

"The unfairness of it all." Aeri says, placing the weight of her head on her arm that was resting on the table. "How about you? Why are you so awake tonight?"

Like Aeri, Jake gazed away from the other to watch the people who passed by them, each having their own stories and reasons as to what could possibly keep them up this late in the night. "I guess you could say a broken heart is quite a tough one to deal with. If I'm going to stay up all night thinking about all the things I could've and should've done, better to do it somewhere else where I have access to food."

"Why did you break up with Bora anyway?" She asked, asking the question she dared not to ask the past day when she learned of their separation. "You didn't seem to be in bad terms the last time I saw you together."

All while they converse, both their eyes remained on the window in front of them, and Aeri wanted to keep it that way because she was afraid of showing more vulnerability than she already was. There were only so little of her darkness she was willing to show, especially to someone she wasn't even close with let alone liked back at school.