Affirmation.

“You’re here again?”

The sound of Jongin's duffle bag hitting the floor echoed through the dance classroom, bouncing off the mirror-covered walls. He was upset with me — for whatever reason. He was upset that, for the past week now, I had been arriving here earlier than usual. That I hadn’t been sitting on that stone bench, counting down the seconds to when I would see him. But I shouldn’t think about that anymore. I chose not to. It’s a hobby I’ve discarded now.

“You can’t keep avoiding him.”

I didn’t look into the mirror. I didn't want to see the look on his face. Jongin’s anger was misplaced — as though he were somehow invested in a relationship forming between Lee Taemin and I. I ignored him, leaning down once more. Stretching my leg on the pole that mounted the wall.

How long had I been doing that same stretch? I needed to stop. Life goes on whether we stretch or not.

Jongin, however, looked to impede my progress into this new routine. His hand suddenly gripped onto my ankle,yanking it upwards. His other hand planted firmly at the small of my back. He held me steady as he let go of my leg and rested it on his shoulder instead. The action made me grimace; my body wasn't ready for such a stretch so early in the morning.

“You’re stiff,” he mumbled, free hand finding its way to my thigh. Fingers gripping down onto my skin as he bent my leg, releasing the tension as he lowered it from his shoulder. A reflexive sigh left my lips in response. He guided my leg, wrapping it around his waist. I could feel his hold on my back tighten. “You still won’t tell me what happened with him at lunch.”

It was a rhetorical question. I hadn’t told Jongin even one detail about the two short sentences Lee Taemin said to me before he left, leaving me at the table by myself. I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want Jongin to try to give me solutions to a non-existent problem. We met once, we won’t meet again.

It was that simple. I wanted to keep it simple. I didn’t want to hyperextend the issue and, more importantly, I didn’t want to hyperextend my calves.

With a single shift of my leg downwards, off his waist, I was able to hook it around his leg. He went tripping backwards. Hand slipping from my back. Eyes widening as he fell. I wasn’t so cruel, however, and I caught his arm, softening his landing.

He looked up, locking eyes with me, his fringe was now a disheveled mess in front of his face. I let go of his hand, letting it slump onto the floor with him. “I’ve put it behind me. So don’t get involved anymore.”

He wouldn’t listen to my words. No. Jongin was the cruel one. He cruelly drove me right back to him that very afternoon. Back to Lee Taemin.

It was lunchtime again, and this time Jongin hadn’t suddenly rescheduled our meeting place. He didn’t bring me to his friends — to Taemin. He brought them to me.

That afternoon, as I turned the corner, my eyes catching sight of what laid in the courtyard surrounded by green not far from where Anatomy was, I saw all five of them again: Jongin, my cruel friend; Chanyeol, the tall one with a head of loose curls; Baekhyun, the tall one’s friend; Sehun, Jongin’s roommate; and him. Lee Taemin. The boy who ran.

The boy whose image I didn’t want to sully further. Whose image I was now frozen in place by. I wanted to turn around. I wanted to turn around and call Jongin to tell him I’d be eating lunch somewhere else today. But I couldn’t. Why?

Because Lee Taemin wasn’t facing away from me. Because unlike that day I decided never to be captured by him again, he sat facing forward. He had seen me. I couldn’t leave now.

Correction: I could.

It was within my ability to do so. But I didn’t. So it’s not that I couldn’t, it’s that I didn’t want to.

I hadn’t seen him in so long. I hadn’t seen those eyes, that head of hair, that subtly sharp curvature of his jaw that made him him in so long. But that wasn’t what caught me again. It was that piece of fabric that hung from his neck that did it. That bright red scarf that hung to him. That’s what made me not want to leave. That’s why I was now walking towards the group of them, greeted by Jongin not soon after.

Because it gave me hope. It gave me hope even though I knew it was hopeless.

Hope that he was still him. That Lee Taemin was the boy who ran. That they weren’t two different entities I had to separate within my mind.

That red scarf captured me. Captured me again. And the reasons I had for avoiding that stone bench every morning, for counting backwards from 60 each day at 7:31, for arriving at ballet class early, seemed so faraway. So faraway that they didn’t matter anymore.

“Well, aren’t you happy today?” Jongin commented as I took a seat beside him at the stone table — one of many in the courtyard. I looked happy? I wasn't smiling. Not that I knew of. Yet I looked happy? Or was Jongin just trying to make light of what he’d done? Was he just trying to convince me that it was a happy thing he’d done for me?

Just as his statement set off numerous questions in my mind, the current look I was getting from Taemin did the same. There was an odd mix of doom and gloom that twisted through his stare. Why he was looking at me like that — as though I had wronged him somehow. But, as Jongin spoke up again, it was gone. Passivity had returned to his face, replacing the expression that left me questioning myself.

“Are you still stiff?" Jongin's lips curved upwards into a smile, his words an inside joke only he and I would understand, "Or have I cured you of your inflexibility?"

I nudged his knee with my own, causing his smile to go bigger. Despite him once more getting involved, once more ignoring my words, once more cruelly acting against me from my own corner of the ring, I couldn't stay angry at him for long. I couldn't as I looked across the table, becoming preoccupied once more with Taemin who, at that moment, actually spoke.

His tone wasn't the same. It had a tilt to it, a kind of pull that made me want to listen. That made me anticipate each syllable that slipped from between his lips. It was warm, in a sense.It was the voice of someone comfortable with their surroundings. Which meant, he was comfortable with me.

But I'm not so ignorant to believe that. I'm not so naive as to simply look past those two short, clipped sentences he uttered to me. Even if his words carried in them a light-hearted vibrato. Even if it seemed as though that persona I caught a glimpse of that day he first spoke to me was as faraway as the reasons I had given for not going to see him every morning.

"Then I guess you two have been practicing for the Winter Spectacular?”

It still amazes me when I look back on it: how natural he sounded. How normal he sounded. How ordinary he sounded when he was anything but.

“You finally agreed?” Sehun questioned me. It took a moment for me to pull my eyes away from Taemin's own in order to realize he had said anything at all. Luckily, Jongin interjected quickly before I could say a single word. Or maybe unluckily?

“We’re still working out the kinks.”

His vague answer almost made me laugh outright. The first kink we had to work out was that I still haven’t agreed to enter the show with him. I didn’t exactly understand why he was pushing the issue so much. I tried suggesting the prospect of stepping up on stage by himself. Although I would never admit this to him, for the sake of not having to hear him bring it up on a daily basis, I didn’t think Jongin needed a partner to dance just as fluidly and loosely as he did without one.

In fact I’d say he's better dancing alone. Yet he objects. For whatever reason, he insists I dance with him. And while I'd been rejecting the idea all along, if he had asked me again, I would've ended up giving in.

I know I would've.

Except I wouldn’t. Why? Because he wouldn’t ask me to perform with him again after this.

“I’ll be looking forward to it,”a deep voice — rough unlike the soft curls on his head — spoke up. Chanyeol was beside Sehun, a comforting smile on his face.

“Why are you acting like you weren’t just pestering Jongin about what they'd be performing? You’re more excited about it than they are,” Baekhyun added from my left, jabbing a thumb in the direction of Jongin and I. Chanyeol’s jaw went slack, eyes widening. Lips trembling as though he had something to say yet couldn’t get the words out. Baekhyun continued on despite the victimized look on the face of the boy with a head full of bouncing curls, “He’s the one photographing for the school newspaper at the Winter Spectacular this year. I for one think the photos are going to be a bit biased.”

Sehun’s and Jongin’s laughter followed Baekhyun’s statement as Chanyeol went pale faced, still at a loss for words. Chanyeol, who was majoring in Photography and worked with the school’s newspaper, is a year older than Jongin and I. Baekhyun, who was majoring in Architecture, was his roommate. He was also in his third year here. Sehun was a freshman majoring in Communications, and he apparently knew Jongin during high school.

All of this was information I learned as I sat there, listening to them talk and offering my own input every once in awhile. Wolfing down the Thai food Jongin had picked up on his way here. Hardly ignoring the red scarf brushing against my shoulder.

Lee Taemin, the boy who ran, was still as ambiguous as he'd been before. He didn’t reveal his major. He didn’t mention where he went to high school. He didn’t mention a single thing about himself. The conversation never gravitated to the point in which he had to divulge himself to the group either.

He remained a mystery until the very end. Until the very end of the get together Jongin had set up today. Until I was left alone with him again, Jongin giving the excuse that he had to print something out at the library before class. Before setting off with Chanyeol, Baekhyun, and Sehun in tow. A sorry excuse if I had ever heard one.

And so there I was, sitting across from him and that red scarf of his. As he stared at me with those eyes of his I had avoided making contact with this entire time. I had gotten myself into this though. I had decided to have hopeless hope. I had decided I wouldn’t turn round the corner and leave before it was too late.

But too late had already passed long ago. Stopping was near impossible now. Stopping myself from heeding my own desire to make contact with him was near impossible. Stopping myself from wanting to see my reflection in his eyes was an unrealistic wish.

Stopping myself from being affected by the words that left his cracked lips now as no one else was watching was futile. Stopping myself from wanting to know what that lilt in his tone meant as he spoke with ambiguity rivaling that which he held in every look. Every bat of long brown eyelashes. Every syllable his voice sent vibrating through the air was hopeless.

“You didn’t come again today.”

I was delusional as the clock hit 7:50 on that cold morning. I was delusional for thinking, as he walked away from me again yesterday afternoon, that I could still turn back. That I could simply forget the boy who ran across that forbidden patch of grass every morning. That I could pretend I didn’t know him, didn’t know of him, in the slightest.

That I didn’t know of the boy who ran. His chestnut brown hair ruffling in the bitter morning breeze. His eyes so deep I fell into them at first sight. His every move exuding effortless confidence even as he simply sat there — existing. As he sat there in front of me on that stone bench. Red scarf bundled tightly around his neck. Fluffing up at the back of his hair. Leaving stray strands extending this way and that.

The current time was 7:50.

And he was here. I was late. I was late because my disillusionment kept me away. Yet he was there.

What was near impossible had reached the realm of impossibility.

Now not only did I not want to walk away. I couldn’t — it was an impossible feat.

So I approached him. I sat down right next to him. He didn’t shift in place in the least, staring straight forward. I did the same. I mimicked his current posture as I breathed out, a cloud of white condensation forming in front of me before it disappeared into the wind.

"Don't you have somewhere to be?" 

It was the only thing I could manage to say to him as we both stared out at that sea of grass in front of us.

He didn’t answer my question. He must have known I knew he had already. Instead, as his lips parted, out from them came four words. An alien, unexpected statement carried itself through his distant tone, his eyes shining pitch black beneath the dull morning sun.

"Do you like me?"

It was black and white. Did I like him or did I not like him? This was the first time he labeled the world in such terms and asked me to pick one. To pick the world: the white. Or to pick him: the black. Maybe my curiosity was too strong. My infatuation with his face, with the way his body moved, with the way his lips breathed, too great. Maybe that’s why I answered his question with a lie.

"Yes."

And that’s when the pirate who sailed across that sea of green offered me, the sailor without a ship, passage. Passage aboard his ship as he journeyed into forbidden waters that shone monochrome hues under his gaze — his bright red flag waving effortlessly in the wind.

"Then let's go out."

A/N: Where you expecting it? I'm sure you were, (it's in the description) but probably not like this right? Did you like it? I know I do. I'm definitely looking forward to next week's update.