[on hold] ANTI-ROMANTIC ; lee heeseung

7

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☾ ! ANTI-ROMANTIC ! ☽
CHAPTER SEVEN
i'm not used to being loved;
i wouldn't know what to do
f. scott fitzgerald
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Wednesday, 4 May 2022
(day 15)

   GOEUN HAD NOT SEEN HEESEUNG AT ALL since last seeing him on Tuesday. She was immensely busy with her workload, trying to get her final piece finished on time to be able to take pictures and annotate before Friday.

   She had not meant to shut herself out but she never dealt well with stress and when she was under pressure, she would rather suffer by herself than let anyone know that she was suffering. And the stress that she was facing was definitely a suffering of its own.

Even though she had not seen Heeseung at all, he would still call her at exactly four in the evening to ask about her day and then he would proceed to ask if she's free to do something for him but she would often just reply back with not today. As much as she was happy that she wasn't running around like a dog would to fetch a toy, there was a part of her that felt guilty. Heeseung was keeping his part of the deal by being an almost okay boyfriend but she didn't make the time to keep up her part of the deal.

She swore to herself that she would make time the moment her assignment was handed in on Friday. She would try to spend the next week with him entirely until it dawned on her that she has one more exam on the seventeenth of May. By the time that that exam rolls around, they would have already been dating for three weeks. One more week after that and they would part ways.

The parting week was far away but Goeun did not want to think about it. She was scared that she might grow attached to Heeseung if she saw him continuously.

Deep in her thoughts, she didn't realise her phone ringing. She gives her face a few soft taps to shake her from her intrusive thoughts and leans over to grasp the phone into her hands. Heeseung has called her five times. She presses her thumbs against the notification, the call going through.

"Hello? Pinocchio? You there?" Heeseung asks frantically, answering the phone after the first ring. "Did something happen? Why did you not answer my call before?"

"Woah, woah. Slow down there, Your Majesty," Goeun jokes softly, touching the speaker button to place her phone back on the floor. "If anyone heard you being so frantic about me not answering your call straight away, they might start think you actually might be caring about me and you don't want that to happen, do you?"

Goeun hears Heeseung chuckle from the other side, a sound she had become so accustomed to listen to through the phone. It was cold milk and warm honey on a sunny afternoon day. It was peace and chaos, all at once.

"You're not doing a good job with keeping up your part of our agreement, are you, Pinocchio?" The words she had been waiting Heeseung to say for the past week were finally out of his mouth. "You still busy with your work?"

"I can make time today but I need you to model again," Goeun tells him, feeling bad that she had to ask him to do something for her again. "I promise you, after one o'clock on Friday, I will start to properly keep my end of our deal,"

"When should we go to the studio then?"

Those words take Goeun by surprise. This is the first time since they started dating that Heeseung would be going with her to Itaewon rather than him asking her to make a trip there by herself.