✓ still into you. ( gayeon )

chapter three: who is lee jooyeon to you?

a/n: ahh thank you everyone for 100+ reads! ily guys sm 🥺

🎸

When he watched Jooyeon walk out that door, he swears he could feel his heart drop. He tried to speak, to just say something. Anything. Anything that would have made him stop. But nothing came out, he couldn't even form words. And by the time he did, it was already too late.

It's been two years since that moment. And Jiseok remembers it distinctly like it all happened yesterday. Sometimes he finds himself wishing it was all a dream. No, a nightmare. A nightmare that would make you wake up in a cold sweat or tears streaming down your face in the middle of the night.

A nightmare that he could wake up from and see Jooyeon staring at him with the same smile he's been giving him for the past two years. A smile he gave before he pulled him into a hug and whispered to him that everything was going to be okay.

But unfortunately, that wasn't how it went. Not even close.

"Here." Comes Jungsu's voice from in front of him, he looks up to see the older male sitting in a place with a slice of pie on it joined with a fork. He looked back at the other with a confused expression. "It's on the house, I figured that if you were going to sit around at the café I work at and mope the entire time, the least I could do is give you free sweets." He sends Jiseok a smile.

Jiseok scoffs. "I'm not moping." He argues, pulling the dessert towards him and getting a bite with the fork.

"Bull shit," Jungsu says, earning a wide-eyed look from the other at his choice of words. Jisung sighs and takes a seat in the chair in front of him and props on the table. Jiseok looks back at him as he chews on the bite of fruit pie in his mouth.

"I know your not one to talk about feelings-" Jungsu began but Jiseok stopped him before he could continue.

"Everything is fine, Jungsu." Jiseok tells him.

"Okay, fine. I don't know what I have to do to make you tell me the way you feel because you never want to tell me anything if something is bothering you, because something was bothering you that night. I know that it was a sad, heartbreaking song and all, which is normal to cry over." Jungsu explains, "But the way you watched him sing those lyrics plus that look in your eyes when you and Jooyeon made brief eye contact, I could tell that the pain you had was not coming from the song at all."

"Oh my, what a detective you are hyung."

"Jiseok, I'm serious!" The older whisper yells, trying his best not to interrupt other customers since it was early in the morning on the weekend. "I've never seen you act that way for a sad song, no matter how hard it hit close to home." He leans forward, "ever." He finishes, emphasizing the last part of his sentence with the tone of his voice.

Well, there was no point in trying to escape now. Jungsu was already in 'Detective Kim' mode and wasn't planning on leaving it until he gets what he wants, which is the answer. A simple, yet so hard to say, answer.

"Fine," Jiseok says. Finishing with his pie and sitting the fork down on the plate, leaning back in his chair and looking at the older. "what do you want to know?"

Jungsu hesitates to answer for a moment to think over his question, laying his chin in the palm of his hand that was propped on the table. "What happened between you and Jooyeon?" he questions, looking at his friend who was quite surprised at how forward his question was.

"Why makes you think that something was happening between us?" Jiseok questions, leaning back in his seat as he crosses his arms over his chest. He was looking back at the other male.

"I know what I saw Jiseok, something had to have happened between you two to cause not only you but him as well to burst into tears like that. Besides, I saw the look in his eyes when he first saw you. I was standing right beside you, It doesn't take a college degree to notice the tension between two people."

Jiseok knew that this day would come. The day when his friend finally becomes curious as to why he always avoids explaining what happened to him and his ex, and who it was, no matter how much Jungsu would try his best to convince the younger.

Course, he didn't expect that this day would have come this quickly.

Jiseok sighs and leans back in his seat, crossing his arms over his chest as he contemplated over what he could say. "In ninth grade, there was this boy that had moved from Daegu. Everyone immediately had a liking for him from the start, because of not only his appearance but his personality. I thought he was cool but I never approached him because well, I was shy." he says, chuckling softly.

"One day during our junior year I had missed the bus because I stayed after class to help one of my classmates, and I guess lucky for me the boy had missed the bus too since he was sitting at the bus stop, holding his guitar case in his hands." A smile formed on his lips at the scene began to play out in his head.

"He spoke to me first and from that point on we were friends, all the way to our senior year. One day after our last class, he told me to meet him in the courtyard and so I did. That is when he confessed to me, he even wrote me a song and sang it to me."

"Was this boy... Jooyeon?" Jungsu asks, trying to piece together everything.

Jiseok nods slowly, "The reason why I cried during that song the night of the concert was that that was the song he sang to me after he confessed. And I guess it just caused me to remember that moment which made me become upset and well.. cry." he tells him.

"Which would also explain why he teared up too, he may have started to remember everything once you, and he made eye contact." Jiseok nods. "Why did you guys break up?" the older one asks.

"After graduation, Jooyeon had invited me over to dinner with his parents where he introduced me as his boyfriend. And let's just say, his father didn't quite handle his only son turning out to be in a gay relationship quite well." Jiseok explains, looking down at his hands in his lap, toying with the charms of his bracelet. The bracelet that he and Jooyeon both got as a gift for each other on their first official date.

"I'm sorry," Jungsu spoke in a low tone as if he was the one at fault for the reason why his and Jooyeon's relationship went up in flames.

"Don't be," Jiseok says, taking a sip of his drink and sighing softly. For once, his body feels at peace. After bottling up his emotions for so long he feels great now that he actually talked with someone. He wonders if things would have turned out differently if he and Jooyeon had talked things out before calling it quits and throwing a year's work of relationship down the drain as if it meant nothing. When in the end, neither could really tell you that there was — or ever will be — a moment that that would be better than all of the memories they spent and made together, as a couple.

STILL INTO YOU written by LOV4GAON
ⓒ LOV4GAON in 2022
EDITED 080522