failed / delivered / seen
luna/kai/sehun/sulli
pg-15 / 5,433w
dead WIP: fixing people is a two-way street.
Puddles. Neon lights. Smoke. Clocks.
The hour hand strikes one.
Jongin smiles and accepts his third drink of the night from Sehun. They clink their glasses together - Sehun spilling most of his on to his shirt - and down it in one gulp. Sehun laughs a little too loudly and claps him on the back before wandering back on the dance floor. Jongin watches him leave, a wry grin playing on the corners of his lips.
At a quarter to 3am there are only a handful of people left in the bar. Sehun is knocked out on one of the beat-up couches pushed up against the wall, one of his shoes missing. Jongin wipes down the tabletop, rinses the last glass, and then throws himself on to the couch with his best friend. Another successful night.
"Huh, what?" Sehun grunts and sits up with a start. He stares blearily at Jongin. "Five more minutes, man,” his head falls back against the armrest and he starts snoring. Jongin snickers, leaning back against the worn leather and surveying the room. There is a couple sitting at one of the tables, toying with their empty glasses and smiling at each other. One of the guys in his physics class is slumped over the bar counter (he had to wipe around him). A girl with short brown hair and clothed all in black is sitting in the other couch, scribbling away in a notebook. She looks up as Jongin stares. He looks away.
"Ah fuck, I have a paper due Monday," Sehun suddenly raises his head again.
Jongin laughs, then stops when someone kicks his shoe.
“I didn’t take 2 hours to make myself up just to be ignored by the two best-looking boys in this place,” says Sunyoung, her arms crossed over her chest and an annoyed look on her face. The dim red light that bathes the bar makes her dark makeup seem even darker, and if Jongin didn’t know any better he’d think she really was angry. Behind her, her 2 other bandmates are chilling at the bar, helping themselves to the jug of beer Jongin left out for them.
“I’m afraid there’s only one good-looking boy in this place right now,” Jongin says as Sehun does a sudden dolphin dive across his lap, grabbing Sunyoung’s hand and pulling her on to the couch beside Jongin.
“You’re looking s…..e...xxaaee..hhh tonight Luna, really hot, I looovveeee ittttt,” he slurs, his cheek brushing against Jongin’s nose as he goes in for a kiss on her cheek.
“Not tonight, lover boy,” Jongin places his hand over his friend’s face and pushes him back into the couch as Sunyoung’s face relaxes into a smile and she laughs. “Will you just fuck off out of here already, it’s closing time and you have to go to church at 8am.”
“No rest for the wicked,” Sehun trips over his words, rolling off the couch and landing on the floor, wrapping his arms around Jongin’s ankles. “God won’t be awake tomorrow either when they start singing in his face.”
The hour hand strikes three.
While Sunyoung attempts to release Jongin’s ankles and keep Sehun’s hands from touching her too inappropriately, Jongin glances back to the red haired girl on the other couch - but she’s already gone.
“She’s cute,” says Sunyoung nonchalantly when she catches Jongin staring at the brown haired girl two weeks later. “Maybe you should talk to her.” She reaches across the bar and pats his hand, Sehun already knocked out beside her, his cheek pressed against her shoulder and his mouth wide open.
Jongin splutters indignantly that he has no idea what she’s talking about, but Sunyoung gets up before he has a chance. “You’re not the only one who works here, my sweet prince,” she says with a wink as Sehun wakes up fast enough to stop himself from breaking his face open on the floor. “She always leaves at 3am on the dot. I’d be quick if I were you.” She laughs while Jongin glares, but she notices his cheeks tinge pink anyway.
She watches him look back at the girl while she adjusts her mike stand. She keeps smiling even when the girl looks away.
“What are we gonna do when we graduate?” Sunyoung asks one night when the three of them are slumped in a couch, the only ones left in the bar at 4am. Jongin’s arm is slung around her shoulder; Sehun’s legs sprawled across the both of them, one of his feet digging into Jongin’s side.
“We’ll get a place together and fight over who does the dishes and cleans the toilets,” says Sehun, his head following the blue M&M that Jongin throws at him. He catches it in his mouth and bites down. “And we’ll enter the catching-things-in-your-mouth tournament and win everything. And you’ll be a famous singer so we’ll be even richer!”
Jongin snickers. “And one day we’ll wake up to Sehun sleeping in a tub of M&Ms,” he gives Sunyoung the packet when she nudges him with her elbow.
“It’s okay, you guys will help me finish it,” Sehun shrugs. “Y’know, since we’ll be, like, together forever.”
“Gross,” says Jongin, but he smiles anyway. And Sunyoung, squashed between her two favorite boys, smiles too.
“He’s a bad influence on you,” says his mother, her voice crackling through the speaker where the reception hits a bad spot and making him wince. “You should stop going to that bar, he’s getting you to drink too much. Are you doing your homework?”
“It’s not him, ma,” he groans perceptibly. His mother says something about the correlation between alcohol and university dropouts and how bartending isn’t even a proper job, and he grits his teeth. “You don’t know anything about him,” Sehun retorts, but he keeps looking at the warning letter sitting beside his laptop, keeps looking at the university’s logo printed on the top and his name in bold red letters.
It takes two weeks before Sehun works up the nerve to tell them.
“What do you fucking mean you’re leaving?” Jongin growls as the rain splatters around them and covers their shoes with muddy sheets. They’re standing on the library lawn, the three of them, and Jongin can’t tell what kinds of looks the people running for shelter are throwing at them. Nor does he really care. Sehun’s hair is plastered around his head and covering his eyes, but Jongin isn’t sure if he really wants to see them anyway.
“I’m failing,” Sehun mumbles. “I don’t want to be here. I’m taking a break so I can figure out what the hell I’m doing with my life.” He doesn’t flick his hair out of his eyes and everything is so uncharacteristically Sehun that Jongin is sure that this is just a dream, Sehun isn’t leaving, Sehun isn’t failing, Sehun isn’t lost…
“You said we’d get a place together and win sweet-catching tournaments,” he manages, and he hates how pathetic this sounds, him throwing all of Sehun’s past words in his face like it would mak a difference. Like Sehun’s past words don’t just belong in the past. “You said we’d be together forever.” He glances at Sunyoung but she doesn’t say anything, her blue hair dark and stuck to her cheeks. She looks like she’s drowning, her freshly printed lecture notes are soaking to rags in her arms, but she doesn’t say anything. She just stares. He swallows. Tries again. “Where the hell are you even gonna go?”
“Anywhere but here,” Sehun says, and Jongin snaps, grabbing and shaking him while Sunyoung yells at him somewhere outside his head, shaking him hard enough to snap some sense into him to make him stop talking. He thinks the yelling is coming out from his mouth, but all he can hear is Sehun’s mumbles and excuses roaring through his brain: I don’t want to be here, I don’t want to be here, I don’t want to be here…
Later when he leaves his two former best friends sitting on the lawn in the thundering rain, his cheek stinging with the slap Sunyoung gave him when she finally pulled them apart after they’d wrestled each other to the ground, he thinks he might regret this in the morning, just like when Sehun woke up to a fresh butterfly tattoo on the left side of his belly button, just like when he had to carry Sunyoung back to her room because she’d worn her highest heels to impress some guy who didn’t even look twice at her.
He thinks he might regret leaving these memories behind in the mud, but that was all they were anyway. Memories.
She’s here again. Same indistinguishable black clothes, same pen shooting rapidly through the pages of her notebook. Same look on her face when their eyes meet.
The whole scene is familiar to Jongin - people might call bars unpredictable, but after 6 months he’s finding it all pretty routine. People come in on their own two feet, people sit in the chairs, people get drinks, people get drunk, people fall off the chairs, people leave slung over the shoulders of their friends.
Hers is a routine familiar to him but she’s the only unpredictable thing in this bar.
Sunyoung doesn’t go to the counter between sets anymore. She sits in the couch - their couch - and sips from her water bottle while her band members joke around with him and beg for free drinks. Sometimes Jongin lets himself look at her, finds himself willing her to look up and at him, but he always looks away when she does anyway.
Sehun left anyway.
you're a fucking liar (!)
come back (!)
Message failed to deliver
He bumps into her when he’s dragging the trash out the back door and trying to heave it into the huge portabin in the alleyway. “Sorry,” he mutters, and then realizes who it is. “Wow, I’m so sorry, really.” He puts down the trash, almost runs his hand through his hair, remembers what he’s just been carrying.
She raises an eyebrow. “Do you only give preferential treatment to your customers or are you only polite to girls?” She doesn’t look amused, but she doesn’t look annoyed either. “I’m in the mood for a drink tonight. What’s the best thing you’ve ever made?”
Jongin doesn’t know how to respond to this strange girl with her girlish looks, and contrasting intimidating aura and wasn’t she shorter looking when she was sitting down? “Uhh… it’s almost 3 though, shouldn’t you be leaving soon? I mean, the bar’s kind of closed and you always leave around this time…”
She smiles then, a close lipped mysterious smile that simultaneously warns him to shut up and lets him know that she’s surprised he noticed. And he thinks he might’ve not quite blown it with this girl yet, because any other girl would’ve left him here in the dark alleyway with the rubbish bag in his hand and the portabin half open.
But he’s Jongin, and Jongin wouldn’t be Jongin if he didn’t do something really stupid, so he does anyway.
“Why do you only leave at 3am anyway?” he asks. “Where do you go? And why 3am?”
Her smile this time is a little less impressed and a little more dangerous when she says “Well, wouldn’t you like to know?” And then she’s gone.
You blew it man, says Sehun’s voice in his head.
“Fuck off,” he mutters.
Sunyoung doesn’t quite know what to do with the girl who suddenly plonks herself in the seat beside her in the middle of her Religious History lecture. Everyone else around her is sleeping, and the lecturer might as well be Professor Binns from Hogwarts in the flesh, his body still talking while his soul floated around the lecture hall, observing nothing.
“Your bartender friend is interesting,” says the girl under her breath while she takes Sunyoung’s notes and flips through them. “A little troubled, a little angry, but interesting nonetheless.”
“What?” says Sunyoung, reaching over and taking her notebook back as gently as she can.
“You look prettier during the day,” says the girl, and Sunyoung recognizes Jongin’s crush from the bar couch, looking fresh and light in a white boyfriend t-shirt and faded denim jeans. She looks less mean, less cold during the day, and Sunyoung wonders if she might look the same as this girl when she layers three faces over her own.
“Uhh, thanks,” she replies, and manages a smile. “So do you.”
“Those of us with double lives should stick together, right?” asks the girl with a cheeky smile.
“Umm,” says Sunyoung, trying to ignore the uneasiness in the back of her throat and ultimately failing. “Yeah. I guess.”
…
if you come back soon i’m sure he’ll be fine, he just needs time to cool down
you know how he is, he’s always been a bloody hothead
lmao
but I hope you’re doing fine and I hope you’ve been able to find yourself
bc god only knows some strange girl has decided to come and find us
haha
i’ll tell you about her next time
Seen 15:04
sehun?
Seen 16:47
i don’t want to lose you too
Delivered 23:50
“So I heard you’re actually pretty smart,” says Jinri, tossing her hair behind her head. In the sun her hair is actually more red than brown, Jongin realizes, and he likes how she styles it in soft waves around her face.
“Where did you hear that from?” he stretches out on the grass in front of the library, his top riding up over his stomach, and he kind of secretly hopes that she’s impressed by what she’s seeing. He glances at her to gauge a reaction and kind of secretly feels disappointed that she’s not even looking at him.
“Oh, I have sources,” she grins, an open easy grin that makes him feel a little out of sorts. Jinri during the day is a virtually different person compared to the Jinri he met during the night, and it sort of unnerves him. But then again, you spent most days hanging with a history nerd who sang in a student bar in 3-inch stilettos and he feels a stab of sadness because the sound of Sunyoung’s voice these days is restricted to just her singing.
“Hi Sunyoung!” Jinri suddenly bursts out, waving furiously at the blue-haired girl descending the library stairs. At first Sunyoung starts, a smile forming in the corner of her lips, but when Jongin sits up and their eyes meet she pauses. He notices her lips purse - Sunyoung’s ultimate look of displeasure, he knows- and then she flashes one last strained smile at Jinri before hurrying away.
“Yeah,” Jongin says absently, watching her until she turns the corner and disappears. “I’m pretty stupid.”
Jinri is looking at him.
“I didn’t know you’d do that,” Sunyoung tells Jinri in their next lecture, hugging her arms around herself. Her hands haven’t stopped shaking since she saw Jinri sitting on the lawn with Jongin. She remembers a time when Jinri was her, and the extra shadow cast on the grass was Sehun, and she doesn’t know if she can forgive this girl for taking her place. If she can forgive Jongin for replacing her so quickly. “I didn’t know you’d hang out with him and let me know about it.”
“I thought you were friends,” says Jinri, playing with her pen and aiming the point of it at the lecturer. She notices Sunyoung watching her and deftly spins the pen away, and Sunyoung thinks she sees something in Jinri’s eyes challenging her before it disappears. “You told me you were best friends, you, Jongin and that other guy, what was his name again, Sehun?”
“Well, yeah,” says Sunyoung, wondering if she might have told too much to this girl whose last name she doesn’t even know. The unease buries itself deeper into the back of her throat, and she turns her attention back to the lecture. “But… we’re not friends anymore. Not since Sehun left.”
Jinri aims her pen at the lecturer again. “But Sehun’s still here.” And when Sunyoung looks questioningly at her she cocks her head to one side, her hair sweeping her shoulders. “People don’t leave until you let them. Anyway, I’m the one here now. And I’m friends with you and I’m friends with Jongin so doesn’t that make you and Jongin friends?”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Sunyoung starts to protest, but Jinri is already doodling over her lecture notes again.
i’m ok
jongin probably won’t be talking to me anymore
the new girl sounds like fun
sunyoung
i don’t even know what i’m looking for
Delivered 03:25
Jongin likes it when Jinri smiles, the rare moments when he catches her in the middle of a genuine, unadulterated laugh, her head thrown back and her eyes squeezed shut. He likes it when she realizes what she might look like and immediately covers her mouth with her hand, and rights her head, though her eyes still twinkle when she looks at him. He likes it when she presses in a little closer when she's peering over his shoulder at some complicated equations that she says she "can't make head nor tails of". He likes it when she taps him on the back of the head when she comes up behind him.
Jongin thinks he likes Jinri.
And yet there's something about her that he can't quite put his finger on. Maybe it's the way she checks herself every time she finds herself laughing uncontrollably, like she's afraid to let herself go. Maybe it's the way she doesn't answer his questions about her and gives him that close-lipped tight smile like the one she gave him outside the back door of the bar when he first properly spoke to her. Maybe it's the way she makes it a point to call out to Sunyoung and wave and smile every time she spots her when they're together.
Jongin hates seeing the hurt cross Sunyoung's face every time.
"Would you stop doing that?" he hisses one particular day in the library, watching Sunyoung hurry out the door with her head bent and a particularly large book clutched to her chest. "Can't you see that you're hurting her?"
Jinri turns innocent eyes to his. "Am I hurting her or are you?" she asks evenly, and goes back to doodling in his notebook.
She's tired of this - tired of the nights where she can't sleep because she's waiting for a reply from Sehun just to let her know that he's still alive, tired of the days spent avoiding Jongin's eye, tired of the band sessions at the bar that are starting to feel more like a ball and chain tightening around her neck. So on a night when Jinri doesn't come to the bar and her band finishes up earlier than usual, Sunyoung takes the opportunity to wait outside in the back alley where the portabins are. Jongin always takes out the rubbish a little before 3. She checks her watch; it's 2.45am.
She's stopped going to her Religious History lectures. It takes all of her willpower to not stab Jinri in the face every time she mentions something new about Jongin that she found out. These facts about Jongin aren't new to Sunyoung - Jongin absolutely squirms at the sight of spiders, Jongin doesn't like to eat things that are colored blue, Jongin has about 10 of the same plaid shirts in different colors; she found out most of these things in the getting-to-know-you stage of their friendship 2 years ago.
And this is what terrifies Sunyoung, this rattling feeling in her bones that she can be replaced so easily by a girl whose last name Jongin probably doesn't even know. That Jongin can take these past 2 years and throw them away like they meant nothing to him, like she meant nothing to him. Like Sehun meant nothing to him. And sometimes the terrified rattles turn into angry quakes and then there are fissures on her skin, cracking and tearing her apart until there's nothing lefts of her but hurt and anger. That's why she's here, standing alone in the shadows of a dark alleyway at 2.50am. She's tired of having to keep dealing with these volcanoes smoking away under her skin, streaming lava into her blood.
She doesn't want to be a walking natural disaster anymore.
2 minutes later the back door opens and Jongin appears, heaving a giant black plastic bag with both his hands. For a second he pauses, looking around, and in that second Sunyoung thinks it would probably be better to just run away and let this go. Let him go. Because when things end with someone who doesn't want any closure, isn't that closure enough?
She's just sliding out along the wall to escape when the back door opens again, dim light flooding the alleyway and catching half her body in it. "Sunyoung?" Jinri calls out, hanging on the doorknob. Jongin freezes between slamming the bin lid shut, and that's when he looks behind him and right at her. "You really are here," Jinri says cheerfully, and closes the door, leaving them in the dark.
For a second no one says anything. Sunyoung is sure he can hear her heart pounding in the silence.
And then, "What do you want." It's quiet, more of a flat mutter than anything else, but she hears it anyway. It roars through her brain, and the volcanoes erupt.
"3 months of avoiding me, and this is all you have to say to me?" Sunyoung spits. In the pale moonlight and distant streetlights she can faintly spot Jongin standing with his back to her. She marches up behind him, all her earlier hesitation gone, and he turns to look at her.
"I'm not the one who runs every time I see you," he retorts, his arms crossed in front of him. "What the hell do you want, Sunyoung. You waited here for me, there must be something you want to say. So say it." She can't read his expression but she can feel how dull his words are.
"Sehun felt like absolute shit the day he left," she blurts out. A passing car beams its headlights over them, and Jongin's expression is obstinate, pained and guilty all at once. Sunyoung is past caring. "But you don't give a fuck about him anymore, right? About me?" The desire to hurt him as much as he hurt her has never been so strong. "Jinri," she starts. Jongin is looking at her. "She's a nice girl, isn't she? She's a good replacement for Sehun and me, isn't she? You deserve to be friends with her, you really do. After all, it must be nice," she gives it all she's got, "to go around hurting people and never having to pay the consequences."
If the silence before was deadly, the silence right now is just like the both of them are dead. Jongin takes in a deep breath, exhales just as slowly, just as loudly. He takes a step forward. "You don't know Sunyoung..." he starts.
"What?" Sunyoung snaps. "What don't I know? You've made everything pretty clear from what I can see."
"I... you're friends with Jinri too, aren't you?" Jongin sounds like he's having difficulty phrasing himself, like he doesn't know exactly what he wants to say, and the fact that he latches on to the subject of Jinri irks her even more.
"What the fuck does that even matter?!" she explodes, and he winces. "I'm friends with her now, you're friends with her now, what does it matter? I was your friend first, Kim Jongin!"
"I don't know what you want me to say to you, Sunyoung," Jongin says in a low voice. "I really don't."
"You're fucking pathetic, Kim Jongin," she spits, and before she can stop herself she kicks him hard in the shin. Jongin yelps and sinks to the ground, clutching his leg. "What the fuck is wrong with you?!" he yells, looking up at her.
"All I ever wanted was for you to ask how Sehun was!" Sunyoung yells back, and promptly bursts into tears. "You're pathetic and I hate you," she growls, scrubbing at her eyes with the back of her hand.
"Sunyoung..." says Jongin, half getting to his feet, but she doesn't want to hear it.
"Don't," she says, shaking her head. "Just don't, Jongin. Don't talk to me ever again. I don't want to hear it." And she turns on her heel and runs.
Puddles. Neon lights. Smoke. Clocks.
“Sunyoung?”
“Jongin.”
“Sunyoung!”
“Jinri?”
“Sehun.”
Sehun slumped over the bar counter, eyes closed. Jinri standing behind the counter, watching the sleeping boy calmly. Sunyoung screaming into the microphone. Jongin takes a step forward, lays a hand on Sehun’s shoulder. And Sehun’s eyes snap open, he’s shaking, his head jerking back and forth like a doll without bones, and Jongin hears a sickening crack before the light in Sehun’s eyes fade, Sunyoung's screams echoing in his ears.
Jongin wakes up covered in cold sweat, letting out a yell when he spots a dark figure sitting at his desk. His door is wide open, but didn’t he lock it before he decided to go to sleep?
“People don’t leave until you let them,” says Jinri. Jongin watches her as she gets up and leaves, closing the door quietly behind her, thoroughly unnerved.
“We need to talk,” Jongin appears in Sunyoung’s door one day looking utterly drained. It's been almost a month since the time in the back alley, and she wonders what happened to him in the time they’ve been apart. Surely they’ve put themselves through the same torture, him for pushing her away and her for letting him. Surely there’s enough pain between them to never want to see each other ever again. Surely there’s nothing left of this relationship to salvage. Surely.
Surely.
But Jongin’s eyes are hooded and beseeching, and by the way he’s hanging on to her doorknob she knows he won’t be leaving without at least getting something out of her - tears, angry swearing, maybe another kick in the shin, she knows he wouldn’t care. She’s seen that look in his eyes before, saw it when he grabbed his best friend and shook him like he wanted him to break.
So “I know,” is all she says, and lets him in.
“Hey, Jinri,” Jongin takes a seat across from her in the dinky little café that the arts students love, all natural light and bare minimal furnishings. Jinri smiles up at him, but her smile widens when she spots Sunyoung behind him, looking cautious as she sits down beside him.
For a few minutes no one says anything until their coffee arrives and Jinri chuckles while she sips at her flat white.
“What’s up?” Sunyoung asks, and Jongin can tell from the way the corner of her eyebrow twitches that she’s just barely holding in her bewilderment. It’s incredible than even after nearly 4 months of not talking to her, he still knows what the slightest raise of her eyebrows means. Sehun would be biting on his upper lip and wagging his eyebrows at one of them by now. He hurriedly takes a big gulp of his Americano, thanking the scalding on his tongue for driving away any thoughts of Oh fucking Sehun.
“I told you you guys were friends,” Jinri replies with a huge smile, then gets up from her seat. Jongin looks at Sunyoung, but she only shakes her head. One of her hands finds the back of his and she pinches it, like she always does when she wants him to shut up. Jongin feels her touch linger on his skin, and this time Sunyoung’s expression is less puzzled and more wistful. Jongin’s gaze falters and he takes to staring at his coffee cup, his hands twisted in his lap until Jinri returns with a large slice of lemon cake smothered in white frosting and three forks. “Jinri,” she points her fork at them and winks, “is always right.”
Puddles. Neon lights. Smoke. Clocks.
The hour hand strikes one.
Sehun is talking too loudly again, waving his hands in the air as Jinri laughs, throwing her head back. Jongin shakes his head with a smirk as he dries glasses and mixes up the occasional cocktail. Sunyoung hugs her mike and finishes with the flair that she’s known for as the last notes fade into the smoky air. The bar bursts into applause.
“I see you guys are getting nicely acquainted,” she remarks, walking up to the bar and giving Jongin a look. He wordlessly hands her a drink.
“I see you guys wasted no time in finding a replacement for me,” says Sehun easily. He looks directly at Jongin and grins, wide and carefree, and raises his beer bottle.
Jongin wakes up. This time Jinri isn’t there.
she’s kind of freaking me out
like i still don’t know anything about her
but everything she says just seems to happen
but like
jongin is talking to me again
i miss you
Delivered 19:07
These days Jinri starts leaving at 1am when she turns up at the bar all clothed in black, she still scrawls in her notebook without talking to anyone until Jongin or Sunyoung approach her, and she still leaves Sunyoung with the rattled feeling in her bones whenever she encounters this night Jinri, who doesn’t seem to like talking to just about anyone.
“We should try getting to know her better,” Jongin mutters to her under the cover of the filler music he puts on when her band takes breaks. “Try to find out what she really wants from us.” He pulls away and reaches behind him for a bottle of gin.
Sunyoung feels the ghost of his breath against her cheek, and tries to ignore the pounding of her heart as she goes over to the couch and sits beside Jinri, flashing a bright smile, knowing she’s seen everything. “You like him,” Jinri observes blandly. Her face is painted red.
Sunyoung balks. “What? Jongin? Me? Liking Jongin? No no no no no,” she laughs and shakes her head, her eyes flitting to Jongin throwing the cocktail shaker in the air and catching it deftly behind him. “We’re just very good friends,” she looks back at Jinri. “You know, he has the biggest crush on you,” she adds. “You were probably the only thing in this bar that he had his eyes on for more than two minutes, and with Jongin that’s a long time.”
Jinri manages a half-smile that looks more to Sunyoung like a grimace. “Past tense,” she shrugs and looks down at her scrawling, “stays in the past.” She notices Sunyoung peering at her book, and deftly snaps it shut.
“Are you alright?” Sunyoung lays a hand on her knee. She still doesn’t know what this girl is about, what she really wants from her and Jongin, but she thinks people like Jinri just wait for someone to make a move first. “You don’t look very good.” And she means it. She’s noticed the dark bags under Jinri’s eyes that didn’t use to be there, her usual pale complexion taking on an unhealthier pallor. Something is bothering Jinri, and she has no idea what it is.
But Jinri just moves her knee away, looks at her watch. “I have to go. I’ll see you in the lecture tomorrow, okay?” And without another word, she’s gone. Sunyoung looks at her hand. She can still feel Jinri shaking.
“This isn’t right,” Jongin mutters, Sunyoung’s hair tickling his chin where they’re pressed together in the space behind the portabins, hidden in the shadows.
pg-15 / 5,433w
dead WIP: fixing people is a two-way street.
Puddles. Neon lights. Smoke. Clocks.
The hour hand strikes one.
Jongin smiles and accepts his third drink of the night from Sehun. They clink their glasses together - Sehun spilling most of his on to his shirt - and down it in one gulp. Sehun laughs a little too loudly and claps him on the back before wandering back on the dance floor. Jongin watches him leave, a wry grin playing on the corners of his lips.
At a quarter to 3am there are only a handful of people left in the bar. Sehun is knocked out on one of the beat-up couches pushed up against the wall, one of his shoes missing. Jongin wipes down the tabletop, rinses the last glass, and then throws himself on to the couch with his best friend. Another successful night.
"Huh, what?" Sehun grunts and sits up with a start. He stares blearily at Jongin. "Five more minutes, man,” his head falls back against the armrest and he starts snoring. Jongin snickers, leaning back against the worn leather and surveying the room. There is a couple sitting at one of the tables, toying with their empty glasses and smiling at each other. One of the guys in his physics class is slumped over the bar counter (he had to wipe around him). A girl with short brown hair and clothed all in black is sitting in the other couch, scribbling away in a notebook. She looks up as Jongin stares. He looks away.
"Ah fuck, I have a paper due Monday," Sehun suddenly raises his head again.
Jongin laughs, then stops when someone kicks his shoe.
“I didn’t take 2 hours to make myself up just to be ignored by the two best-looking boys in this place,” says Sunyoung, her arms crossed over her chest and an annoyed look on her face. The dim red light that bathes the bar makes her dark makeup seem even darker, and if Jongin didn’t know any better he’d think she really was angry. Behind her, her 2 other bandmates are chilling at the bar, helping themselves to the jug of beer Jongin left out for them.
“I’m afraid there’s only one good-looking boy in this place right now,” Jongin says as Sehun does a sudden dolphin dive across his lap, grabbing Sunyoung’s hand and pulling her on to the couch beside Jongin.
“You’re looking s…..e...xxaaee..hhh tonight Luna, really hot, I looovveeee ittttt,” he slurs, his cheek brushing against Jongin’s nose as he goes in for a kiss on her cheek.
“Not tonight, lover boy,” Jongin places his hand over his friend’s face and pushes him back into the couch as Sunyoung’s face relaxes into a smile and she laughs. “Will you just fuck off out of here already, it’s closing time and you have to go to church at 8am.”
“No rest for the wicked,” Sehun trips over his words, rolling off the couch and landing on the floor, wrapping his arms around Jongin’s ankles. “God won’t be awake tomorrow either when they start singing in his face.”
The hour hand strikes three.
While Sunyoung attempts to release Jongin’s ankles and keep Sehun’s hands from touching her too inappropriately, Jongin glances back to the red haired girl on the other couch - but she’s already gone.
“She’s cute,” says Sunyoung nonchalantly when she catches Jongin staring at the brown haired girl two weeks later. “Maybe you should talk to her.” She reaches across the bar and pats his hand, Sehun already knocked out beside her, his cheek pressed against her shoulder and his mouth wide open.
Jongin splutters indignantly that he has no idea what she’s talking about, but Sunyoung gets up before he has a chance. “You’re not the only one who works here, my sweet prince,” she says with a wink as Sehun wakes up fast enough to stop himself from breaking his face open on the floor. “She always leaves at 3am on the dot. I’d be quick if I were you.” She laughs while Jongin glares, but she notices his cheeks tinge pink anyway.
She watches him look back at the girl while she adjusts her mike stand. She keeps smiling even when the girl looks away.
“What are we gonna do when we graduate?” Sunyoung asks one night when the three of them are slumped in a couch, the only ones left in the bar at 4am. Jongin’s arm is slung around her shoulder; Sehun’s legs sprawled across the both of them, one of his feet digging into Jongin’s side.
“We’ll get a place together and fight over who does the dishes and cleans the toilets,” says Sehun, his head following the blue M&M that Jongin throws at him. He catches it in his mouth and bites down. “And we’ll enter the catching-things-in-your-mouth tournament and win everything. And you’ll be a famous singer so we’ll be even richer!”
Jongin snickers. “And one day we’ll wake up to Sehun sleeping in a tub of M&Ms,” he gives Sunyoung the packet when she nudges him with her elbow.
“It’s okay, you guys will help me finish it,” Sehun shrugs. “Y’know, since we’ll be, like, together forever.”
“Gross,” says Jongin, but he smiles anyway. And Sunyoung, squashed between her two favorite boys, smiles too.
“He’s a bad influence on you,” says his mother, her voice crackling through the speaker where the reception hits a bad spot and making him wince. “You should stop going to that bar, he’s getting you to drink too much. Are you doing your homework?”
“It’s not him, ma,” he groans perceptibly. His mother says something about the correlation between alcohol and university dropouts and how bartending isn’t even a proper job, and he grits his teeth. “You don’t know anything about him,” Sehun retorts, but he keeps looking at the warning letter sitting beside his laptop, keeps looking at the university’s logo printed on the top and his name in bold red letters.
It takes two weeks before Sehun works up the nerve to tell them.
“What do you fucking mean you’re leaving?” Jongin growls as the rain splatters around them and covers their shoes with muddy sheets. They’re standing on the library lawn, the three of them, and Jongin can’t tell what kinds of looks the people running for shelter are throwing at them. Nor does he really care. Sehun’s hair is plastered around his head and covering his eyes, but Jongin isn’t sure if he really wants to see them anyway.
“I’m failing,” Sehun mumbles. “I don’t want to be here. I’m taking a break so I can figure out what the hell I’m doing with my life.” He doesn’t flick his hair out of his eyes and everything is so uncharacteristically Sehun that Jongin is sure that this is just a dream, Sehun isn’t leaving, Sehun isn’t failing, Sehun isn’t lost…
“You said we’d get a place together and win sweet-catching tournaments,” he manages, and he hates how pathetic this sounds, him throwing all of Sehun’s past words in his face like it would mak a difference. Like Sehun’s past words don’t just belong in the past. “You said we’d be together forever.” He glances at Sunyoung but she doesn’t say anything, her blue hair dark and stuck to her cheeks. She looks like she’s drowning, her freshly printed lecture notes are soaking to rags in her arms, but she doesn’t say anything. She just stares. He swallows. Tries again. “Where the hell are you even gonna go?”
“Anywhere but here,” Sehun says, and Jongin snaps, grabbing and shaking him while Sunyoung yells at him somewhere outside his head, shaking him hard enough to snap some sense into him to make him stop talking. He thinks the yelling is coming out from his mouth, but all he can hear is Sehun’s mumbles and excuses roaring through his brain: I don’t want to be here, I don’t want to be here, I don’t want to be here…
Later when he leaves his two former best friends sitting on the lawn in the thundering rain, his cheek stinging with the slap Sunyoung gave him when she finally pulled them apart after they’d wrestled each other to the ground, he thinks he might regret this in the morning, just like when Sehun woke up to a fresh butterfly tattoo on the left side of his belly button, just like when he had to carry Sunyoung back to her room because she’d worn her highest heels to impress some guy who didn’t even look twice at her.
He thinks he might regret leaving these memories behind in the mud, but that was all they were anyway. Memories.
She’s here again. Same indistinguishable black clothes, same pen shooting rapidly through the pages of her notebook. Same look on her face when their eyes meet.
The whole scene is familiar to Jongin - people might call bars unpredictable, but after 6 months he’s finding it all pretty routine. People come in on their own two feet, people sit in the chairs, people get drinks, people get drunk, people fall off the chairs, people leave slung over the shoulders of their friends.
Hers is a routine familiar to him but she’s the only unpredictable thing in this bar.
Sunyoung doesn’t go to the counter between sets anymore. She sits in the couch - their couch - and sips from her water bottle while her band members joke around with him and beg for free drinks. Sometimes Jongin lets himself look at her, finds himself willing her to look up and at him, but he always looks away when she does anyway.
Sehun left anyway.
you're a fucking liar (!)
come back (!)
Message failed to deliver
He bumps into her when he’s dragging the trash out the back door and trying to heave it into the huge portabin in the alleyway. “Sorry,” he mutters, and then realizes who it is. “Wow, I’m so sorry, really.” He puts down the trash, almost runs his hand through his hair, remembers what he’s just been carrying.
She raises an eyebrow. “Do you only give preferential treatment to your customers or are you only polite to girls?” She doesn’t look amused, but she doesn’t look annoyed either. “I’m in the mood for a drink tonight. What’s the best thing you’ve ever made?”
Jongin doesn’t know how to respond to this strange girl with her girlish looks, and contrasting intimidating aura and wasn’t she shorter looking when she was sitting down? “Uhh… it’s almost 3 though, shouldn’t you be leaving soon? I mean, the bar’s kind of closed and you always leave around this time…”
She smiles then, a close lipped mysterious smile that simultaneously warns him to shut up and lets him know that she’s surprised he noticed. And he thinks he might’ve not quite blown it with this girl yet, because any other girl would’ve left him here in the dark alleyway with the rubbish bag in his hand and the portabin half open.
But he’s Jongin, and Jongin wouldn’t be Jongin if he didn’t do something really stupid, so he does anyway.
“Why do you only leave at 3am anyway?” he asks. “Where do you go? And why 3am?”
Her smile this time is a little less impressed and a little more dangerous when she says “Well, wouldn’t you like to know?” And then she’s gone.
You blew it man, says Sehun’s voice in his head.
“Fuck off,” he mutters.
Sunyoung doesn’t quite know what to do with the girl who suddenly plonks herself in the seat beside her in the middle of her Religious History lecture. Everyone else around her is sleeping, and the lecturer might as well be Professor Binns from Hogwarts in the flesh, his body still talking while his soul floated around the lecture hall, observing nothing.
“Your bartender friend is interesting,” says the girl under her breath while she takes Sunyoung’s notes and flips through them. “A little troubled, a little angry, but interesting nonetheless.”
“What?” says Sunyoung, reaching over and taking her notebook back as gently as she can.
“You look prettier during the day,” says the girl, and Sunyoung recognizes Jongin’s crush from the bar couch, looking fresh and light in a white boyfriend t-shirt and faded denim jeans. She looks less mean, less cold during the day, and Sunyoung wonders if she might look the same as this girl when she layers three faces over her own.
“Uhh, thanks,” she replies, and manages a smile. “So do you.”
“Those of us with double lives should stick together, right?” asks the girl with a cheeky smile.
“Umm,” says Sunyoung, trying to ignore the uneasiness in the back of her throat and ultimately failing. “Yeah. I guess.”
…
if you come back soon i’m sure he’ll be fine, he just needs time to cool down
you know how he is, he’s always been a bloody hothead
lmao
but I hope you’re doing fine and I hope you’ve been able to find yourself
bc god only knows some strange girl has decided to come and find us
haha
i’ll tell you about her next time
Seen 15:04
sehun?
Seen 16:47
i don’t want to lose you too
Delivered 23:50
“So I heard you’re actually pretty smart,” says Jinri, tossing her hair behind her head. In the sun her hair is actually more red than brown, Jongin realizes, and he likes how she styles it in soft waves around her face.
“Where did you hear that from?” he stretches out on the grass in front of the library, his top riding up over his stomach, and he kind of secretly hopes that she’s impressed by what she’s seeing. He glances at her to gauge a reaction and kind of secretly feels disappointed that she’s not even looking at him.
“Oh, I have sources,” she grins, an open easy grin that makes him feel a little out of sorts. Jinri during the day is a virtually different person compared to the Jinri he met during the night, and it sort of unnerves him. But then again, you spent most days hanging with a history nerd who sang in a student bar in 3-inch stilettos and he feels a stab of sadness because the sound of Sunyoung’s voice these days is restricted to just her singing.
“Hi Sunyoung!” Jinri suddenly bursts out, waving furiously at the blue-haired girl descending the library stairs. At first Sunyoung starts, a smile forming in the corner of her lips, but when Jongin sits up and their eyes meet she pauses. He notices her lips purse - Sunyoung’s ultimate look of displeasure, he knows- and then she flashes one last strained smile at Jinri before hurrying away.
“Yeah,” Jongin says absently, watching her until she turns the corner and disappears. “I’m pretty stupid.”
Jinri is looking at him.
“I didn’t know you’d do that,” Sunyoung tells Jinri in their next lecture, hugging her arms around herself. Her hands haven’t stopped shaking since she saw Jinri sitting on the lawn with Jongin. She remembers a time when Jinri was her, and the extra shadow cast on the grass was Sehun, and she doesn’t know if she can forgive this girl for taking her place. If she can forgive Jongin for replacing her so quickly. “I didn’t know you’d hang out with him and let me know about it.”
“I thought you were friends,” says Jinri, playing with her pen and aiming the point of it at the lecturer. She notices Sunyoung watching her and deftly spins the pen away, and Sunyoung thinks she sees something in Jinri’s eyes challenging her before it disappears. “You told me you were best friends, you, Jongin and that other guy, what was his name again, Sehun?”
“Well, yeah,” says Sunyoung, wondering if she might have told too much to this girl whose last name she doesn’t even know. The unease buries itself deeper into the back of her throat, and she turns her attention back to the lecture. “But… we’re not friends anymore. Not since Sehun left.”
Jinri aims her pen at the lecturer again. “But Sehun’s still here.” And when Sunyoung looks questioningly at her she cocks her head to one side, her hair sweeping her shoulders. “People don’t leave until you let them. Anyway, I’m the one here now. And I’m friends with you and I’m friends with Jongin so doesn’t that make you and Jongin friends?”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Sunyoung starts to protest, but Jinri is already doodling over her lecture notes again.
i’m ok
jongin probably won’t be talking to me anymore
the new girl sounds like fun
sunyoung
i don’t even know what i’m looking for
Delivered 03:25
Jongin likes it when Jinri smiles, the rare moments when he catches her in the middle of a genuine, unadulterated laugh, her head thrown back and her eyes squeezed shut. He likes it when she realizes what she might look like and immediately covers her mouth with her hand, and rights her head, though her eyes still twinkle when she looks at him. He likes it when she presses in a little closer when she's peering over his shoulder at some complicated equations that she says she "can't make head nor tails of". He likes it when she taps him on the back of the head when she comes up behind him.
Jongin thinks he likes Jinri.
And yet there's something about her that he can't quite put his finger on. Maybe it's the way she checks herself every time she finds herself laughing uncontrollably, like she's afraid to let herself go. Maybe it's the way she doesn't answer his questions about her and gives him that close-lipped tight smile like the one she gave him outside the back door of the bar when he first properly spoke to her. Maybe it's the way she makes it a point to call out to Sunyoung and wave and smile every time she spots her when they're together.
Jongin hates seeing the hurt cross Sunyoung's face every time.
"Would you stop doing that?" he hisses one particular day in the library, watching Sunyoung hurry out the door with her head bent and a particularly large book clutched to her chest. "Can't you see that you're hurting her?"
Jinri turns innocent eyes to his. "Am I hurting her or are you?" she asks evenly, and goes back to doodling in his notebook.
She's tired of this - tired of the nights where she can't sleep because she's waiting for a reply from Sehun just to let her know that he's still alive, tired of the days spent avoiding Jongin's eye, tired of the band sessions at the bar that are starting to feel more like a ball and chain tightening around her neck. So on a night when Jinri doesn't come to the bar and her band finishes up earlier than usual, Sunyoung takes the opportunity to wait outside in the back alley where the portabins are. Jongin always takes out the rubbish a little before 3. She checks her watch; it's 2.45am.
She's stopped going to her Religious History lectures. It takes all of her willpower to not stab Jinri in the face every time she mentions something new about Jongin that she found out. These facts about Jongin aren't new to Sunyoung - Jongin absolutely squirms at the sight of spiders, Jongin doesn't like to eat things that are colored blue, Jongin has about 10 of the same plaid shirts in different colors; she found out most of these things in the getting-to-know-you stage of their friendship 2 years ago.
And this is what terrifies Sunyoung, this rattling feeling in her bones that she can be replaced so easily by a girl whose last name Jongin probably doesn't even know. That Jongin can take these past 2 years and throw them away like they meant nothing to him, like she meant nothing to him. Like Sehun meant nothing to him. And sometimes the terrified rattles turn into angry quakes and then there are fissures on her skin, cracking and tearing her apart until there's nothing lefts of her but hurt and anger. That's why she's here, standing alone in the shadows of a dark alleyway at 2.50am. She's tired of having to keep dealing with these volcanoes smoking away under her skin, streaming lava into her blood.
She doesn't want to be a walking natural disaster anymore.
2 minutes later the back door opens and Jongin appears, heaving a giant black plastic bag with both his hands. For a second he pauses, looking around, and in that second Sunyoung thinks it would probably be better to just run away and let this go. Let him go. Because when things end with someone who doesn't want any closure, isn't that closure enough?
She's just sliding out along the wall to escape when the back door opens again, dim light flooding the alleyway and catching half her body in it. "Sunyoung?" Jinri calls out, hanging on the doorknob. Jongin freezes between slamming the bin lid shut, and that's when he looks behind him and right at her. "You really are here," Jinri says cheerfully, and closes the door, leaving them in the dark.
For a second no one says anything. Sunyoung is sure he can hear her heart pounding in the silence.
And then, "What do you want." It's quiet, more of a flat mutter than anything else, but she hears it anyway. It roars through her brain, and the volcanoes erupt.
"3 months of avoiding me, and this is all you have to say to me?" Sunyoung spits. In the pale moonlight and distant streetlights she can faintly spot Jongin standing with his back to her. She marches up behind him, all her earlier hesitation gone, and he turns to look at her.
"I'm not the one who runs every time I see you," he retorts, his arms crossed in front of him. "What the hell do you want, Sunyoung. You waited here for me, there must be something you want to say. So say it." She can't read his expression but she can feel how dull his words are.
"Sehun felt like absolute shit the day he left," she blurts out. A passing car beams its headlights over them, and Jongin's expression is obstinate, pained and guilty all at once. Sunyoung is past caring. "But you don't give a fuck about him anymore, right? About me?" The desire to hurt him as much as he hurt her has never been so strong. "Jinri," she starts. Jongin is looking at her. "She's a nice girl, isn't she? She's a good replacement for Sehun and me, isn't she? You deserve to be friends with her, you really do. After all, it must be nice," she gives it all she's got, "to go around hurting people and never having to pay the consequences."
If the silence before was deadly, the silence right now is just like the both of them are dead. Jongin takes in a deep breath, exhales just as slowly, just as loudly. He takes a step forward. "You don't know Sunyoung..." he starts.
"What?" Sunyoung snaps. "What don't I know? You've made everything pretty clear from what I can see."
"I... you're friends with Jinri too, aren't you?" Jongin sounds like he's having difficulty phrasing himself, like he doesn't know exactly what he wants to say, and the fact that he latches on to the subject of Jinri irks her even more.
"What the fuck does that even matter?!" she explodes, and he winces. "I'm friends with her now, you're friends with her now, what does it matter? I was your friend first, Kim Jongin!"
"I don't know what you want me to say to you, Sunyoung," Jongin says in a low voice. "I really don't."
"You're fucking pathetic, Kim Jongin," she spits, and before she can stop herself she kicks him hard in the shin. Jongin yelps and sinks to the ground, clutching his leg. "What the fuck is wrong with you?!" he yells, looking up at her.
"All I ever wanted was for you to ask how Sehun was!" Sunyoung yells back, and promptly bursts into tears. "You're pathetic and I hate you," she growls, scrubbing at her eyes with the back of her hand.
"Sunyoung..." says Jongin, half getting to his feet, but she doesn't want to hear it.
"Don't," she says, shaking her head. "Just don't, Jongin. Don't talk to me ever again. I don't want to hear it." And she turns on her heel and runs.
Puddles. Neon lights. Smoke. Clocks.
“Sunyoung?”
“Jongin.”
“Sunyoung!”
“Jinri?”
“Sehun.”
Sehun slumped over the bar counter, eyes closed. Jinri standing behind the counter, watching the sleeping boy calmly. Sunyoung screaming into the microphone. Jongin takes a step forward, lays a hand on Sehun’s shoulder. And Sehun’s eyes snap open, he’s shaking, his head jerking back and forth like a doll without bones, and Jongin hears a sickening crack before the light in Sehun’s eyes fade, Sunyoung's screams echoing in his ears.
Jongin wakes up covered in cold sweat, letting out a yell when he spots a dark figure sitting at his desk. His door is wide open, but didn’t he lock it before he decided to go to sleep?
“People don’t leave until you let them,” says Jinri. Jongin watches her as she gets up and leaves, closing the door quietly behind her, thoroughly unnerved.
“We need to talk,” Jongin appears in Sunyoung’s door one day looking utterly drained. It's been almost a month since the time in the back alley, and she wonders what happened to him in the time they’ve been apart. Surely they’ve put themselves through the same torture, him for pushing her away and her for letting him. Surely there’s enough pain between them to never want to see each other ever again. Surely there’s nothing left of this relationship to salvage. Surely.
Surely.
But Jongin’s eyes are hooded and beseeching, and by the way he’s hanging on to her doorknob she knows he won’t be leaving without at least getting something out of her - tears, angry swearing, maybe another kick in the shin, she knows he wouldn’t care. She’s seen that look in his eyes before, saw it when he grabbed his best friend and shook him like he wanted him to break.
So “I know,” is all she says, and lets him in.
“Hey, Jinri,” Jongin takes a seat across from her in the dinky little café that the arts students love, all natural light and bare minimal furnishings. Jinri smiles up at him, but her smile widens when she spots Sunyoung behind him, looking cautious as she sits down beside him.
For a few minutes no one says anything until their coffee arrives and Jinri chuckles while she sips at her flat white.
“What’s up?” Sunyoung asks, and Jongin can tell from the way the corner of her eyebrow twitches that she’s just barely holding in her bewilderment. It’s incredible than even after nearly 4 months of not talking to her, he still knows what the slightest raise of her eyebrows means. Sehun would be biting on his upper lip and wagging his eyebrows at one of them by now. He hurriedly takes a big gulp of his Americano, thanking the scalding on his tongue for driving away any thoughts of Oh fucking Sehun.
“I told you you guys were friends,” Jinri replies with a huge smile, then gets up from her seat. Jongin looks at Sunyoung, but she only shakes her head. One of her hands finds the back of his and she pinches it, like she always does when she wants him to shut up. Jongin feels her touch linger on his skin, and this time Sunyoung’s expression is less puzzled and more wistful. Jongin’s gaze falters and he takes to staring at his coffee cup, his hands twisted in his lap until Jinri returns with a large slice of lemon cake smothered in white frosting and three forks. “Jinri,” she points her fork at them and winks, “is always right.”
Puddles. Neon lights. Smoke. Clocks.
The hour hand strikes one.
Sehun is talking too loudly again, waving his hands in the air as Jinri laughs, throwing her head back. Jongin shakes his head with a smirk as he dries glasses and mixes up the occasional cocktail. Sunyoung hugs her mike and finishes with the flair that she’s known for as the last notes fade into the smoky air. The bar bursts into applause.
“I see you guys are getting nicely acquainted,” she remarks, walking up to the bar and giving Jongin a look. He wordlessly hands her a drink.
“I see you guys wasted no time in finding a replacement for me,” says Sehun easily. He looks directly at Jongin and grins, wide and carefree, and raises his beer bottle.
Jongin wakes up. This time Jinri isn’t there.
she’s kind of freaking me out
like i still don’t know anything about her
but everything she says just seems to happen
but like
jongin is talking to me again
i miss you
Delivered 19:07
These days Jinri starts leaving at 1am when she turns up at the bar all clothed in black, she still scrawls in her notebook without talking to anyone until Jongin or Sunyoung approach her, and she still leaves Sunyoung with the rattled feeling in her bones whenever she encounters this night Jinri, who doesn’t seem to like talking to just about anyone.
“We should try getting to know her better,” Jongin mutters to her under the cover of the filler music he puts on when her band takes breaks. “Try to find out what she really wants from us.” He pulls away and reaches behind him for a bottle of gin.
Sunyoung feels the ghost of his breath against her cheek, and tries to ignore the pounding of her heart as she goes over to the couch and sits beside Jinri, flashing a bright smile, knowing she’s seen everything. “You like him,” Jinri observes blandly. Her face is painted red.
Sunyoung balks. “What? Jongin? Me? Liking Jongin? No no no no no,” she laughs and shakes her head, her eyes flitting to Jongin throwing the cocktail shaker in the air and catching it deftly behind him. “We’re just very good friends,” she looks back at Jinri. “You know, he has the biggest crush on you,” she adds. “You were probably the only thing in this bar that he had his eyes on for more than two minutes, and with Jongin that’s a long time.”
Jinri manages a half-smile that looks more to Sunyoung like a grimace. “Past tense,” she shrugs and looks down at her scrawling, “stays in the past.” She notices Sunyoung peering at her book, and deftly snaps it shut.
“Are you alright?” Sunyoung lays a hand on her knee. She still doesn’t know what this girl is about, what she really wants from her and Jongin, but she thinks people like Jinri just wait for someone to make a move first. “You don’t look very good.” And she means it. She’s noticed the dark bags under Jinri’s eyes that didn’t use to be there, her usual pale complexion taking on an unhealthier pallor. Something is bothering Jinri, and she has no idea what it is.
But Jinri just moves her knee away, looks at her watch. “I have to go. I’ll see you in the lecture tomorrow, okay?” And without another word, she’s gone. Sunyoung looks at her hand. She can still feel Jinri shaking.
“This isn’t right,” Jongin mutters, Sunyoung’s hair tickling his chin where they’re pressed together in the space behind the portabins, hidden in the shadows.