It Ends with Us • Kim Mingyu

[five]

It's yet evening, and we can barely keep our eyes open. The afternoon dose of medicines they've given me must be same with hers -- both of us have been yawning for quite a great deal of time.

I'm constantly tapping my feet, swinging it back and forth to keep myself distracted. It was helping at the beginning, but now I'm growing tired and more somnolent.

She's gaping at the clock. Her pupils follow the second hand in a circular motion, as if it'll somehow help her to stay awake.

The police officer with a sturdy body and stubble beards standing outside the room has been silently signalling me to leave. I've pretended not to see it for the seventh time now. I was planning on doing that until they send one of their workers and forcefully drag me out of here, but unfortunately our eyes have meet and I can no longer avoid him.

I hold my palm in the air and beg for five more minutes. I don't want to leave now, I can't leave now.

Not until I secure a promise from her, that this won't be the last time we'll be seeing each other; that someday soon, we'll meet again -- not as enemies, but as better versions of ourselves we're proud of.

Let it be an indefinite one. Let it be an unspoken one. Let it be a one we can't keep.

I still want it, for the assurance it brings.

"Do you . . ." I interject carefully. "Maybe want to. . . come back to KMG Entertainment?"

Her perfectly shaped eyebrows -- now a little messy with a hint of catastrophe -- come in close contact with each other upon my words.

"Are you out of your mind?" She says, denial already soaring like rogue waves.

"No, I'm not. I'm very serious, as a matter of fact," I protest. "Do you want to?"

Her gaze drops at her cuffed hands, rested on her lap. She buys herself some time by fiddling around with the diamond shaped fabric of her gown, tracing undetermined lines over it.

"I screwed up the moment he walked in. I can't go back in there. And besides, I'm fired anyway." She mutters much afterwards.

"But, do you want to?"

"I had fun working there. It was nice, really nice. But, I wasn't me," she says. "The girl with a secret armory of her own, who wears her weapons like ornaments, maiming and killing as her way to earn a living, the peripatetic life with no one telling her what to do or what not to do . . . that's me, the real me."

The genuine smile she has on her face right now; gleaming like a bright miracle we see in dreams, for it extends to her eyes and deep into my soul makes me realize that she had fallen in love with her job as an assassin long before she had fallen for Mingyu.

It's a brilliant perception, it wraps me up in a surge of curious rapture and I wonder if she realized it as well during her time here, and if she feels the same.

I wonder what brand new beginning it opens its doors to.

"You know, I was thinking. Maybe . . . I can use this . . . skill, or whatever . . .  for betterment." She remarks.

I perk up. "Like, for the government?"

She responds with small nod of her head.

"Sure you can. Hitwomen working for government are always on demand, right?" I say, feigning certainty. Would've googled it, but I left my phone on my bed.

I just have to make her believe me, though it's unlikely.

"If you do, which government are you planning to work for?"