secret Valentine 2011 : for aoza
For: aoza
From: Your Secret Valentine ♥
Title: This is for Real
Pairing: Changmin/Yoona
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 2851
Reminder: Author is not allowed to reply to comments before names are revealed.
Having a valentine is akin to a silent competition. At least, usually, it’s silent. For some people, there is a lot of waiting by the phone, there is a lot of talking on the phone, there is a lot of talking face-to-face with someone you want to be your valentine (or someone who already is your valentine, or someone who also wants a valentine but both of you are left without one).
In Yoona’s case, today, forty-eight hours before Valentine’s Day, she undergoes a lot of internal monologues. Love-related monologues, to be exact. She’s received a few text messages, one out of however many actually being connected to the holiday coming up on the 14th, from Minho.
Yoona tries not to think too much of it. Minho flirts with everyone. She adores him, she really does, but he’s grown from that lanky, shy case of a cute boy to an outright flirt-albeit a kind, convincing, genuine one at best. Not to mention, she knows he’s much more interested in Yuri in the first place.
The days leading up to Valentine’s Day are the worst of it, though, she tells herself. Because-logic-you don’t know what’s going to happen. There’s anticipation, and that’s what truly gets to people and tears them apart from the inside out, especially if they have someone in mind yet that someone has someone else in mind.
The anticipation is, was, and will always be horrible for some, but the result should typically prove alright. No scars, no flesh wounds. It’s okay.
“I’ll be okay,” Yoona says out loud, like an affirmation, only there’s no mirror to stare herself down through.
Jessica walks into the kitchen, eyes glancing over Yoona’s hands under tap water. “Are you going to turn off the sink?”
Loneliness sinks in again on the twelfth. It happens like that, most of the time. Then again, Changmin’s loneliness is usually sporadic, but before the day, it is expected, like an old friend. Or a cousin you played with as toddlers but feel awkward around as adults.
Yunho is clipping his toenails in the bathroom when Changmin walks by and doesn’t say anything-instead his face does all the talking, or just enough. Yunho breaks the silence. Clip, clip, “Hey, what’s up with you?”
Walking backwards, Changmin appears in the doorway again. “Nothing.”
“You looked like a kicked puppy.”
“But I’m not.’
“I said you look like one, not that you are one.” Clip, clip, almost done.
“Right.”
“There has to be something,” he says, putting the clippers down, and then deciding a few seconds later while Changmin is being mute to put them back into the top drawer. “Come on. Tell hyung your problems.”
Changmin wrinkles his forehead, eyebrows pulling together. “I have no problems.”
“Nobody has no problems.”
“Hyung.”
“What? It’s true. No one is perfect. Didn’t you learn that in elementary school or something?” Yunho stands up from the toilet seat cover, the one that a fan gave them. It’s still a little odd, having it in their bathroom, but at the same time, it completed the space. They couldn’t bring themselves to get rid of it.
For a moment, Changmin feels like a girl; like he and Yunho have morphed into two teenage girls about to talk it out, about to talk about love. Yunho was fixing up his toenails a few seconds ago, after all. His upper lip curls a little at the thought. Too weird.
He pats Changmin’s shoulder. “Is it the season?”
“Tis not the season to be jolly,” says the maknae.
“It could be,” he pauses; corrects, “no, it should be. Valentine’s! Happy hearts, love, chocolate. Want hyung to buy you chocolates? What am I saying? You’ll get some-and by that, I’m still only talking about the candy.”
They both stop and remember the fans. Someone had already sent them chocolate earlier this morning. And then their minds both seemed to drift. There’d been this one Valentine’s where a poor, lonely girl had sent Jaejoong her underwear taped to the lid of a box of chocolates. Changmin had been upset over perfectly ruined chocolates, and he and Junsu proceeded to argue over whether or not it was okay to still eat them. The panties in question were most likely clean, although not one out of the five was willing to check. Eventually Yoochun suggested they could have been poisoned (meaning, of course, the chocolates), and then they all established a rule; a rule in which they weren’t allowed to talk about this ever again.
She knew there was something underhanded about Heechul wanting to take her and Jessica out shopping. Well, it was more along the lines of Heechul taking the two of them out shopping so he could get Yoona to leave Jessica in front of a pretzel stand nearby. Underhanded, otherwise known as Kim Heechul’s middle name.
Heechul throws an arm around Yoona’s shoulders. They’re both trying on new sweaters right in front of the racks they found them on, too lazy and too busy to use a dressing room (“You can just put them over your clothes anyway,” Heechul always says). They stand in front of the mirror like they’re working one of their modeling jobs.
“He isn’t going to break your heart, is he?” he starts, catching Yoona off guard. His tone reminds her of a few days ago when Onew stopped her in the hall and asked her what time it was.
“Excuse me?”
“I know it can happen. You aren’t exempt from that rule, my dear,” he says.
“I’m lost,” she shakes her head. “Why are we talking about this right now?”
Heechul lowers his mouth to her ear, darting his eyes around in search of anyone that might be looking at them. Yoona furrows her eyebrows at him through the mirror. He opens his mouth to say something, when-
“There you are!” a voice calls to them; Jessica’s voice, to be exact. Heechul stands up straight. “You disappeared!”
“Well you were taking too long!”
“To get a pretzel you wanted,” she remarked. Heechul stuck his tongue out at her. And then he was lost in the argument, leaving Yoona puzzled and staring at her reflection in the mirror.
The thing is: they both have valentines. They’d had valentines for a little under two months, and refused to spill any information on it. Even in the company, they felt that their secret needed to be kept under lock and key. Neither of them was willing to risk it.
2010: the Christmas party. Mistletoe. Shim Changmin walked straight into Im Yoona underneath the mistletoe without noticing. Yunho and Heechul, the devil’s best friends in this kind of situation, were cheering. So it happened. A kiss happened, with other eyes on them, but it hasn’t been spoken of since. Changmin sometimes wonders if it actually did happen or if everyone who’d paid a decent amount of attention had also had more than a decent amount of alcohol.
That was how it started. Something so innocent turned into a secretive mess that still no one seemed to know about but the two of them. It was a well-kept secret, in that case.
Yoona. Im Yoona. Yoona is pretty. She is into him, and Yunho has said so before. He says he can see it in her eyes. At the time, Changmin couldn’t bring himself to say anything about it in front of his hyung. No one was supposed to know. No one still is.
She is one of Korea’s most natural-looking beauties, and whether she knows it or not, she uses it to her advantage. She’ll flash a smile and unknowingly make someone fall in love with her for an hour, before they go their separate ways. Maybe that’s how Siwon feels during a photoshoot with her, or perhaps they are immune to each other by now.
But, Changmin feels as though he’s far from being immune to her. It’s a blessing and a curse that SM Town’s 2010 concert tour is continuing into 2011, because it means he’ll see her semi-regularly. There would be less of running into her by chance because he’s too afraid to just call her, even after they’ve gone past the not-so-simple step of confessing. The task sounds simple, but when the mere idea of it festers in someone’s said-particularly Changmin’s-the drive deteriorates with worry. He’d put off texting her until the next day, instead of calling. Cop-out.
He rolls over in his bed and watches the clock stumble from 11:59 to midnight. He is never going to be immune to her at this rate. She’d bewitched him.
Finally, he calls.
“Are you going?” he asks, “To the party?”
She thinks about it. “I guess so. Seohyun wants me to.”
“Yonghwa’s going to be there,” he states, halfway between a question and a declaration.
She curls her fingers tighter around the phone. Hearing his voice starts to make her bite her lip, tapping her free hand against the counter top while the other eight girls are still asleep.
“I want to see you,” he breathes, and then stops to wait through her pause on the other end.
She’s crossing and uncrossing her legs, sitting on the counter now when she answers. A smile forms. “Then I’ll be there.”
Yoona arrives arm-in-arm with Seohyun, looking like the close friends that they are, but loses her to Yonghwa in under twenty minutes. Thankfully, the two of them turn shy around company. Still, though, with a kind force, Seohyun leads him around, and they warm up to everyone. They become everyone’s favorite couple. Everyone wants to be like them, and Yoona hates herself for hoping that something is wrong beneath the surface. She hates herself, too, for knowing that she must be a little bit right.
It’s a mostly SM Town party, she should be able to find someone to stand next to without looking lost, shouldn’t she? There are the stragglers from other companies, like Yonghwa and Jonghyun from FNC, and some YG and JYP kids.
She looks around, tries to find Heechul, sees that Yuri is busy with Minho, tries to find Donghae, sees that Jonghyun (the Lee one) is alone yet fearless on the outside, and tries to find Changmin.
Five minutes later, she’s standing next to Lee Jonghyun, engaging in sporadic conversation about comebacks and all that fun business, discreetly searching for anyone. It feels horribly like a high school dance, where Yoona’s date ran off to be with someone else. She doesn’t blame Seohyun for leaving her when she has a TV husband to worry about, but Yoona doesn’t like the feeling of being alone in a room full of people she knows, next to someone she’s speaking with but isn’t truly listening to. He’s handsome, she’ll give him that, and he’s interesting, she’ll give him that, too. Yet, she can’t focus herself. She’s gone, gone into another place where she suddenly isn’t sure if gravity is pulling her down anymore.
“I’m sorry, what did you just say?” she asks, gently putting her hand against Jonghyun’s shoulder.
He grins, obviously a bit bashful from her presence. Embarrassed, maybe, that she wasn’t listening to him. “Nothing, Yoona-ssi.”
“I’m sorry,” she says again. She could like him if she let herself, if she let go and tried to figure out what she wanted. She could like him as more than just a fellow celebrity or something close to a friend. He could be something more to her, if she just let go of whatever she was searching for. Yoona wasn’t going to find it if she kept obsessively working at it, with no results. “I need some air. Excuse me,” she adds, and he lets her leave. Perhaps he understands more than she thinks he does about her. She could like him if she didn’t have someone else in mind.
He arrives about a half hour late, tumbling out of a car with Heechul and Yunho. The latter goes in first, not even noticing when the former pulls Changmin back, keeping him from entering. Changmin’s hand is still on the face of the door.
“What are you intending to do with her?” asks Heechul.
Changmin blinks a few times before letting the door close, realizing that neither of them are going in until Heechul has an answer. They are friends, at the most, or dongsaeng and hyung-sunbae and hoobae, maybe-but Heechul has an unfamiliar look in his eyes; a look that worries Changmin.
“What exactly are you trying to do with her?” he speaks again.
“Talk,” says Changmin, then shaking his head. “I don’t understand what you’re getting at, hyung,” he adds, putting his hand against the door again, in a sudden surge of courage. He is going to go inside, march into that Valentine’s party and reach her, and screw Kim Heechul if he is going to try getting in the way. But Heechul’s face is twisted in disapproval. “What’s wrong?”
His eyes soften, though the rest of his face is still tough and intimidating. “Just looking out for her,” he says, pocketing his hand. “It’s what I do.”
Changmin’s too afraid to say, “don’t you usually just look after yourself?” because he knows what might happen to him. He’s been on Heechul’s good side these days, and that’s a good place to be.
No, he can’t let himself chicken out just for the sake of being on Kim Heechul’s good side. He needs to fight for this right now. Once he’s in, he’s in.
“Okay,” says Changmin. “Okay, hyung.”
“I care about her-”
“And you think I don’t?”
Heechul pauses. “She told me. About the aftermath.”
“Oh. Nothing big happened, hyung, I swear,” he interjects, although he isn’t sure why he’s busying himself trying to garner an understanding. “We’re only-”
“I know what you two are doing. But you still need to tell me what you want out of this,” Heechul says, nonchalantly checking his nails, like they were chatting about anything at all mundane, not Yoona.
Changmin sighs. “I only want to go inside. I just want to see her. And talk. I told her I’d be coming,” he clenches his jaw for one second before putting his hands on Heechul’s shoulders. “Hyung, I love you, but you aren’t going to stop me.”
Ten minutes of fresh air out back and she’s let her hair down, in a literal sense. She’s been leaning against the wall, staring into the street on the other side of the club that’d been bought out for the night for the sake of this party. She’s not sure if she should care, though, that she hasn’t been enjoying herself. This party isn’t completely for her; it’s for the others in there, too. She’s a small portion belonging to the rest of the whole.
“You told Heechul-hyung,” says a voice. It’s Changmin, trying to sneak up on her.
“He’s like a brother to me. And he’s better at keeping secrets than you’d think. He just isn’t good at keeping his own secrets, most of the time. Also, he’s really good at figuring things out. It’s Heechul.”
He can’t figure out how to argue with her. She has a point. No one else knows anything about the two of them. No one even talks about the Christmas party’s mistletoe moment, and there had even been at least two others-only no one else had dared to go for the real thing and kiss anyone else on the lips. Changmin sighs. Something always happens at a party. After the SM Town in LA after-party, Jessica and Jonghyun couldn’t look at each other with a straight face for at least a month.
“Are you mad?”
“No.”
She hesitates, starting to smile. Changmin can see the corners of her mouth turning upwards. “Good.” Coming closer, he puts his coat around her shoulders. She has her own coat, but there’s something about giving it to her anyway that makes Changmin feel good enough to not need his own jacket.
“He seemed kind of angry,” Changmin chuckles.
“Who? Heechul-oppa?”
He nods.
She laughs, soft and loud at the same time. “He gets angry at a lot of things, haven’t you noticed?”
Again, Changmin nods, but they both stop talking suddenly. She reaches out and takes one of his hands out of his pockets, folding her smaller fingers inside of his. He wants to put his arm around her shoulders, but this move is just as good. Something about that simple move makes him feel like he doesn’t need anything else. He’s slowly forgetting where he is and thinking only about her. She’s bewitched him. They smile at each other, but look away in childish embarrassment, laughing like school kids.
“So,” he squeezes her hand, “should we go?”
She looks at him again, recovering. And she gives a few small nods as she bites her lip. “Yes.”
“Coffee. I’m buying.”
For a moment, she thinks about arguing. She’s a big girl and she can pay for her own coffee. But she’s also a big girl in love who doesn’t need to pay for her own drinks anymore. It’s about time she accepted it. Plus, she left her wallet on the table just inside the SNSD dorm. “If you insist,” she says.
From: Your Secret Valentine ♥
Title: This is for Real
Pairing: Changmin/Yoona
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 2851
Reminder: Author is not allowed to reply to comments before names are revealed.
Having a valentine is akin to a silent competition. At least, usually, it’s silent. For some people, there is a lot of waiting by the phone, there is a lot of talking on the phone, there is a lot of talking face-to-face with someone you want to be your valentine (or someone who already is your valentine, or someone who also wants a valentine but both of you are left without one).
In Yoona’s case, today, forty-eight hours before Valentine’s Day, she undergoes a lot of internal monologues. Love-related monologues, to be exact. She’s received a few text messages, one out of however many actually being connected to the holiday coming up on the 14th, from Minho.
Yoona tries not to think too much of it. Minho flirts with everyone. She adores him, she really does, but he’s grown from that lanky, shy case of a cute boy to an outright flirt-albeit a kind, convincing, genuine one at best. Not to mention, she knows he’s much more interested in Yuri in the first place.
The days leading up to Valentine’s Day are the worst of it, though, she tells herself. Because-logic-you don’t know what’s going to happen. There’s anticipation, and that’s what truly gets to people and tears them apart from the inside out, especially if they have someone in mind yet that someone has someone else in mind.
The anticipation is, was, and will always be horrible for some, but the result should typically prove alright. No scars, no flesh wounds. It’s okay.
“I’ll be okay,” Yoona says out loud, like an affirmation, only there’s no mirror to stare herself down through.
Jessica walks into the kitchen, eyes glancing over Yoona’s hands under tap water. “Are you going to turn off the sink?”
Loneliness sinks in again on the twelfth. It happens like that, most of the time. Then again, Changmin’s loneliness is usually sporadic, but before the day, it is expected, like an old friend. Or a cousin you played with as toddlers but feel awkward around as adults.
Yunho is clipping his toenails in the bathroom when Changmin walks by and doesn’t say anything-instead his face does all the talking, or just enough. Yunho breaks the silence. Clip, clip, “Hey, what’s up with you?”
Walking backwards, Changmin appears in the doorway again. “Nothing.”
“You looked like a kicked puppy.”
“But I’m not.’
“I said you look like one, not that you are one.” Clip, clip, almost done.
“Right.”
“There has to be something,” he says, putting the clippers down, and then deciding a few seconds later while Changmin is being mute to put them back into the top drawer. “Come on. Tell hyung your problems.”
Changmin wrinkles his forehead, eyebrows pulling together. “I have no problems.”
“Nobody has no problems.”
“Hyung.”
“What? It’s true. No one is perfect. Didn’t you learn that in elementary school or something?” Yunho stands up from the toilet seat cover, the one that a fan gave them. It’s still a little odd, having it in their bathroom, but at the same time, it completed the space. They couldn’t bring themselves to get rid of it.
For a moment, Changmin feels like a girl; like he and Yunho have morphed into two teenage girls about to talk it out, about to talk about love. Yunho was fixing up his toenails a few seconds ago, after all. His upper lip curls a little at the thought. Too weird.
He pats Changmin’s shoulder. “Is it the season?”
“Tis not the season to be jolly,” says the maknae.
“It could be,” he pauses; corrects, “no, it should be. Valentine’s! Happy hearts, love, chocolate. Want hyung to buy you chocolates? What am I saying? You’ll get some-and by that, I’m still only talking about the candy.”
They both stop and remember the fans. Someone had already sent them chocolate earlier this morning. And then their minds both seemed to drift. There’d been this one Valentine’s where a poor, lonely girl had sent Jaejoong her underwear taped to the lid of a box of chocolates. Changmin had been upset over perfectly ruined chocolates, and he and Junsu proceeded to argue over whether or not it was okay to still eat them. The panties in question were most likely clean, although not one out of the five was willing to check. Eventually Yoochun suggested they could have been poisoned (meaning, of course, the chocolates), and then they all established a rule; a rule in which they weren’t allowed to talk about this ever again.
She knew there was something underhanded about Heechul wanting to take her and Jessica out shopping. Well, it was more along the lines of Heechul taking the two of them out shopping so he could get Yoona to leave Jessica in front of a pretzel stand nearby. Underhanded, otherwise known as Kim Heechul’s middle name.
Heechul throws an arm around Yoona’s shoulders. They’re both trying on new sweaters right in front of the racks they found them on, too lazy and too busy to use a dressing room (“You can just put them over your clothes anyway,” Heechul always says). They stand in front of the mirror like they’re working one of their modeling jobs.
“He isn’t going to break your heart, is he?” he starts, catching Yoona off guard. His tone reminds her of a few days ago when Onew stopped her in the hall and asked her what time it was.
“Excuse me?”
“I know it can happen. You aren’t exempt from that rule, my dear,” he says.
“I’m lost,” she shakes her head. “Why are we talking about this right now?”
Heechul lowers his mouth to her ear, darting his eyes around in search of anyone that might be looking at them. Yoona furrows her eyebrows at him through the mirror. He opens his mouth to say something, when-
“There you are!” a voice calls to them; Jessica’s voice, to be exact. Heechul stands up straight. “You disappeared!”
“Well you were taking too long!”
“To get a pretzel you wanted,” she remarked. Heechul stuck his tongue out at her. And then he was lost in the argument, leaving Yoona puzzled and staring at her reflection in the mirror.
The thing is: they both have valentines. They’d had valentines for a little under two months, and refused to spill any information on it. Even in the company, they felt that their secret needed to be kept under lock and key. Neither of them was willing to risk it.
2010: the Christmas party. Mistletoe. Shim Changmin walked straight into Im Yoona underneath the mistletoe without noticing. Yunho and Heechul, the devil’s best friends in this kind of situation, were cheering. So it happened. A kiss happened, with other eyes on them, but it hasn’t been spoken of since. Changmin sometimes wonders if it actually did happen or if everyone who’d paid a decent amount of attention had also had more than a decent amount of alcohol.
That was how it started. Something so innocent turned into a secretive mess that still no one seemed to know about but the two of them. It was a well-kept secret, in that case.
Yoona. Im Yoona. Yoona is pretty. She is into him, and Yunho has said so before. He says he can see it in her eyes. At the time, Changmin couldn’t bring himself to say anything about it in front of his hyung. No one was supposed to know. No one still is.
She is one of Korea’s most natural-looking beauties, and whether she knows it or not, she uses it to her advantage. She’ll flash a smile and unknowingly make someone fall in love with her for an hour, before they go their separate ways. Maybe that’s how Siwon feels during a photoshoot with her, or perhaps they are immune to each other by now.
But, Changmin feels as though he’s far from being immune to her. It’s a blessing and a curse that SM Town’s 2010 concert tour is continuing into 2011, because it means he’ll see her semi-regularly. There would be less of running into her by chance because he’s too afraid to just call her, even after they’ve gone past the not-so-simple step of confessing. The task sounds simple, but when the mere idea of it festers in someone’s said-particularly Changmin’s-the drive deteriorates with worry. He’d put off texting her until the next day, instead of calling. Cop-out.
He rolls over in his bed and watches the clock stumble from 11:59 to midnight. He is never going to be immune to her at this rate. She’d bewitched him.
Finally, he calls.
“Are you going?” he asks, “To the party?”
She thinks about it. “I guess so. Seohyun wants me to.”
“Yonghwa’s going to be there,” he states, halfway between a question and a declaration.
She curls her fingers tighter around the phone. Hearing his voice starts to make her bite her lip, tapping her free hand against the counter top while the other eight girls are still asleep.
“I want to see you,” he breathes, and then stops to wait through her pause on the other end.
She’s crossing and uncrossing her legs, sitting on the counter now when she answers. A smile forms. “Then I’ll be there.”
Yoona arrives arm-in-arm with Seohyun, looking like the close friends that they are, but loses her to Yonghwa in under twenty minutes. Thankfully, the two of them turn shy around company. Still, though, with a kind force, Seohyun leads him around, and they warm up to everyone. They become everyone’s favorite couple. Everyone wants to be like them, and Yoona hates herself for hoping that something is wrong beneath the surface. She hates herself, too, for knowing that she must be a little bit right.
It’s a mostly SM Town party, she should be able to find someone to stand next to without looking lost, shouldn’t she? There are the stragglers from other companies, like Yonghwa and Jonghyun from FNC, and some YG and JYP kids.
She looks around, tries to find Heechul, sees that Yuri is busy with Minho, tries to find Donghae, sees that Jonghyun (the Lee one) is alone yet fearless on the outside, and tries to find Changmin.
Five minutes later, she’s standing next to Lee Jonghyun, engaging in sporadic conversation about comebacks and all that fun business, discreetly searching for anyone. It feels horribly like a high school dance, where Yoona’s date ran off to be with someone else. She doesn’t blame Seohyun for leaving her when she has a TV husband to worry about, but Yoona doesn’t like the feeling of being alone in a room full of people she knows, next to someone she’s speaking with but isn’t truly listening to. He’s handsome, she’ll give him that, and he’s interesting, she’ll give him that, too. Yet, she can’t focus herself. She’s gone, gone into another place where she suddenly isn’t sure if gravity is pulling her down anymore.
“I’m sorry, what did you just say?” she asks, gently putting her hand against Jonghyun’s shoulder.
He grins, obviously a bit bashful from her presence. Embarrassed, maybe, that she wasn’t listening to him. “Nothing, Yoona-ssi.”
“I’m sorry,” she says again. She could like him if she let herself, if she let go and tried to figure out what she wanted. She could like him as more than just a fellow celebrity or something close to a friend. He could be something more to her, if she just let go of whatever she was searching for. Yoona wasn’t going to find it if she kept obsessively working at it, with no results. “I need some air. Excuse me,” she adds, and he lets her leave. Perhaps he understands more than she thinks he does about her. She could like him if she didn’t have someone else in mind.
He arrives about a half hour late, tumbling out of a car with Heechul and Yunho. The latter goes in first, not even noticing when the former pulls Changmin back, keeping him from entering. Changmin’s hand is still on the face of the door.
“What are you intending to do with her?” asks Heechul.
Changmin blinks a few times before letting the door close, realizing that neither of them are going in until Heechul has an answer. They are friends, at the most, or dongsaeng and hyung-sunbae and hoobae, maybe-but Heechul has an unfamiliar look in his eyes; a look that worries Changmin.
“What exactly are you trying to do with her?” he speaks again.
“Talk,” says Changmin, then shaking his head. “I don’t understand what you’re getting at, hyung,” he adds, putting his hand against the door again, in a sudden surge of courage. He is going to go inside, march into that Valentine’s party and reach her, and screw Kim Heechul if he is going to try getting in the way. But Heechul’s face is twisted in disapproval. “What’s wrong?”
His eyes soften, though the rest of his face is still tough and intimidating. “Just looking out for her,” he says, pocketing his hand. “It’s what I do.”
Changmin’s too afraid to say, “don’t you usually just look after yourself?” because he knows what might happen to him. He’s been on Heechul’s good side these days, and that’s a good place to be.
No, he can’t let himself chicken out just for the sake of being on Kim Heechul’s good side. He needs to fight for this right now. Once he’s in, he’s in.
“Okay,” says Changmin. “Okay, hyung.”
“I care about her-”
“And you think I don’t?”
Heechul pauses. “She told me. About the aftermath.”
“Oh. Nothing big happened, hyung, I swear,” he interjects, although he isn’t sure why he’s busying himself trying to garner an understanding. “We’re only-”
“I know what you two are doing. But you still need to tell me what you want out of this,” Heechul says, nonchalantly checking his nails, like they were chatting about anything at all mundane, not Yoona.
Changmin sighs. “I only want to go inside. I just want to see her. And talk. I told her I’d be coming,” he clenches his jaw for one second before putting his hands on Heechul’s shoulders. “Hyung, I love you, but you aren’t going to stop me.”
Ten minutes of fresh air out back and she’s let her hair down, in a literal sense. She’s been leaning against the wall, staring into the street on the other side of the club that’d been bought out for the night for the sake of this party. She’s not sure if she should care, though, that she hasn’t been enjoying herself. This party isn’t completely for her; it’s for the others in there, too. She’s a small portion belonging to the rest of the whole.
“You told Heechul-hyung,” says a voice. It’s Changmin, trying to sneak up on her.
“He’s like a brother to me. And he’s better at keeping secrets than you’d think. He just isn’t good at keeping his own secrets, most of the time. Also, he’s really good at figuring things out. It’s Heechul.”
He can’t figure out how to argue with her. She has a point. No one else knows anything about the two of them. No one even talks about the Christmas party’s mistletoe moment, and there had even been at least two others-only no one else had dared to go for the real thing and kiss anyone else on the lips. Changmin sighs. Something always happens at a party. After the SM Town in LA after-party, Jessica and Jonghyun couldn’t look at each other with a straight face for at least a month.
“Are you mad?”
“No.”
She hesitates, starting to smile. Changmin can see the corners of her mouth turning upwards. “Good.” Coming closer, he puts his coat around her shoulders. She has her own coat, but there’s something about giving it to her anyway that makes Changmin feel good enough to not need his own jacket.
“He seemed kind of angry,” Changmin chuckles.
“Who? Heechul-oppa?”
He nods.
She laughs, soft and loud at the same time. “He gets angry at a lot of things, haven’t you noticed?”
Again, Changmin nods, but they both stop talking suddenly. She reaches out and takes one of his hands out of his pockets, folding her smaller fingers inside of his. He wants to put his arm around her shoulders, but this move is just as good. Something about that simple move makes him feel like he doesn’t need anything else. He’s slowly forgetting where he is and thinking only about her. She’s bewitched him. They smile at each other, but look away in childish embarrassment, laughing like school kids.
“So,” he squeezes her hand, “should we go?”
She looks at him again, recovering. And she gives a few small nods as she bites her lip. “Yes.”
“Coffee. I’m buying.”
For a moment, she thinks about arguing. She’s a big girl and she can pay for her own coffee. But she’s also a big girl in love who doesn’t need to pay for her own drinks anymore. It’s about time she accepted it. Plus, she left her wallet on the table just inside the SNSD dorm. “If you insist,” she says.