Ever since the day he walked through the front door of your cafe hand in hand with his sweet daughter on one gloomy afternoon in the middle of winter, he had captured your heart without him even knowing it. All the time, you had chosen to stay on th...
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chapter vi. dying embers
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Through the years that you have spent dealing with grief, you had oftentimes wondered if you would still be able to feel anything else other than the familiar pain that has become a permanent part of you.
You had always wondered if you would still be able to feel anything other than the lingering pain, or perhaps something even greater, even after enduring such a terrible loss in the past. While at the same time, you had often wondered if you would be able to recognise it when your heart would finally be ready to open up to new love and another chance of happiness.
Never once had you expected to have that chance of happiness slipping away from you before you even recognised its presence. It had happened so fast, so brief, and you have no one to blame but yourself for letting it happen. You had often denied the flutters in your heart, telling yourself that it had been nothing but a sense of comfort instead of something else. Something deeper and new, which could have opened up your heart to feel a lot more. And you had ignored its presence instead of looking deeper into it to understand what it had truly meant when your heart thumped differently whenever your eyes met Seokjin's or whenever he was near.
Never once had you realised that the warm feeling that you had towards your new friend and companion had somehow developed into something other than admiration until it was far too late. That the only one responsible for allowing that chance of happiness to slip away had been none other than you.
Just as the season begins to change to the next, you can feel the dynamics between you and Seokjin and his daughter begin to change.
After the night you had overheard Seokjin's conversation with his best friend, everything had gone as it normally would, with the father and daughter pair coming to visit the cafe three times the next week before the night he was supposed to go on that date finally came. Seokjin had taken his daughter to the cafe on the same day, buying her a box of cinnamon bread to take home with her as she was supposed to spend the weekend at her grandparents, and it was then when you found out that the date was actually happening.
You had refrained from talking or asking about it, knowing that it had been none of your business. But it was still hard for you to ignore the way it hurt you just to think about him with another woman and how hard it feels for you to think about the pair with someone else added into the picture.
The week right after the date, you had immediately noticed something different with Seokjin the moment he came in during his visits. There was a new light in his smile and there was a new sense of confidence in his footsteps when he was guiding his daughter into the cafe. But the one change that you had easily noticed was the tightness in your chest when you knew the reason behind his new aura.
