betwixt - enhypen

𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐞: 𝐢𝐭'𝐬 𝐚 (𝐬𝐭𝐮𝐝𝐲) 𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐞

it had been a few weeks since their last encounter, and joori had conveniently sat away from jay every day during the times that they had lessons. they took glances across the room at one another, and at times joori would conveniently drop her pen to look up at him.

of course, jay noticed, and he chose to give her space. sooner or later it would end up in a confrontation, but until then they were acting out of character, convincing themselves that they would never speak to each other again, despite that notion being scarce at best.

joori tried her best to concentrate on her teacher, she was paying a lot to go to these lectures and she couldn't afford to compromise her investment, or rather, her parents' investment.

so far, her grades had been almost perfect, typical for her. when the teacher put up a list of students that were currently failing each week, she always read it, looking towards the bottom of her list through the choi names until she was safe. until a few weeks ago, she hadn't been looking for jay's name; she hadn't even been looking for jake's name despite how much she still hated him.

after overhearing that jay was failing, she couldn't help herself, she had to check each time if he was actually failing, but to her disappointment: he really was. joori had believed that jay's disregard for school was nothing but boredom, but maybe now joori thought, it was something else. before having time to fully think through her actions and take the appropriate response, she texted him.

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you wanna study together later?

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sure, where?

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shit. she regretted sending the text as soon as the blue line disappeared and the word delivered appeared above the message. now she started overthinking how she had sounded, was she being pushy? was it obvious she knew he was failing? was he just accepting her invitation out of politeness?

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the library?

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yeah, after this?

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she overheard a group of students mentioning a familiar branch closing, which piqued her interest and joori put her phone away. she'd give him the answer when the lecture ended, half an hour away from her currently tapping away at her notes. meticulously detailing how the korean writing system evolved from earlier chinese scripts. the attention to detail was distracting her from any inner thoughts and directing her focus towards the front of the hall rather than the back.

a while later, joori had her face stuck in a book, looking anywhere other than at jay. you see, it was easy for joori to send the message, but hard for her to show up. what was she going to say to him? preferably for her, nothing. so that's what she did, she sat in silence whilst jay tried to concentrate, despite wanting to know why joori had broken the stalemate and invited him.

no one just goes on study dates when they want to, because no one wants to study in the first place.

"ahem," jay cleared his throat obviously, barely being discreet in the already quiet library.