PUCKER UP ❆ LEE HAECHAN

❆ chapter twenty-six

His lips were pressed tightly against someone else's.

Honestly, it shouldn't have made her angry. They weren't dating. They never dated, in fact. It was a silly high school talking stage, and now they're just friends again.

But it didn't change the fact that it made her stomach churn, and the nausea was enough to sober her back up, in time for her to realise that her eyes were currently locked onto Haechan's while he had a blonde girl's arms hooked around his neck.

So Hyerim did the logical thing in her brain, which was to run.

She ran past Jaemin, who reached out an arm to try and stop her. She ran past Jeno with a girl in the hallway, who called her name confusedly. She ran down the driveway, crouching down on the curb, waiting for her uber.

As she got in the car, her heart hurt. Not that he had kissed that girl - well, yes, she was upset about that. But she was more upset about the fact that he didn't even stop her. He didn't even try to explain - not that he owed her one, really. Maybe she was being unreasonable. Was she being unreasonable?

Hyerim leaned her head on the window of the car. She could feel the alcohol settling uncomfortably in her stomach, the alcohol mixing with whatever liquids and food she had consumed earlier, and the nausea increased.

Eventually, she had to ask the uber driver to pull over, so she could get out, stumbling towards the shrubbery, one hand holding her hair away from her face and the other clasping onto the neckline of her dress as she violently emptied the contents of her stomach into the bush, crying so hard that she gasped for air, hands clawing at her chest, because it should've been him holding her hair back and rubbing her back soothingly in circles instead of her, all by herself, squatting next to her uber.

❆

"You look emo, get up."

Hyerim squinted her eyes when Jihee pulled back the curtains to her room, flooding the room with much needed sunlight.

"I get one day, I mean you were hungover, it was your first time drinking. But three days? C'mon, this is pathetic. You need to get up and haul your ass to your lectures," Jihee instructed while bending down to pick up a few socks scattered around the floor, along with a shirt.

Hyerim said nothing, instead cocooning her face further inside her bed covers, avoiding eye contact when Jihee neared the bed, staring down at her with her hands on her hips like an angry mother.

"I'm giving you ten minutes. If you're not up by then, I'm coming in here and yanking that blanket off of you." Jihee marched off, leaving the door wide open, and Hyerim had no choice but to sit up, dangling her feet off her bed as she reached for her phone to see the time.

Her eyes flitted over the gift bag that sat on her study desk. Haechan's gift, that she was meant to give him, when he was going to leave once the party had finished and driven her home like usual, and she would tell him to come up to her apartment and she would give him the gift, and the cake that was sitting in the fridge. The cake that she had rushed out of a lecture early to line up for, because she knew he liked that flavour - he had liked it since high school, and it would sell out often so she had to be there when they started selling them.

She hated herself so much. She felt stupid - she had dressed up so nice, put in all this effort, went shopping for a gift she thought he would like and gotten his favourite cake and had all of this planned, and at the end of the day she would have to face the painful reminder that he wasn't hers, and he never would be.

And with that, she tore her gaze away from the paper bag, giving herself a mental reminder to return the item to the store after her lecture.

❆

It had been two weeks since Haechan's birthday incident. Surprisingly, Hyerim hadn't seen Haechan on campus at all, although she did walk past Jeno once, and saw Jaemin from a distance. Sometimes she would see a guy with purple hair, or a similar black graphic shirt to his, or maybe a similar build and her heart would race, just a little, only for them to turn around and for Hyerim to realise that it wasn't him, and she would feel stupid again.

She thought two weeks would've been a solid period of time to feel better about the incident. But it wasn't. And in this period of time she had confirmed something, that she had a sneaky suspicion about before this incident, but now she was absolutely, one hundred percent sure.

Kwon Hyerim had a crush on Lee Haechan.

At first, the realisation made her cheeks flare up, and her legs start swinging in her desk chair as she worked on her essay and she slapped herself to snap out of it, to get herself together. But she couldn't help but recall all of their memories, from high school to now, and she realised that to get over Haechan, she would have to talk about all of this, to sort it out between the two of them and confess her feelings for him to harshly reject her so that she would be hurt for a while, but eventually receive closure and move on.

The timing was perfect. Jihee bounded into the dorm, a wide smile on her face. A party, she had announced.

"Girl, this is literally the time to get your getback! This is it girl!" She waved her arms excitedly in the air, and for once Hyerim didn't grimace. She didn't scowl when Jihee pulled out yet another tiny dress from her wardrobe, and she didn't yell when Jihee accidentally pulled on her hair while straightening it, and she didn't complain when Jihee forcefully peeled her eyes open to apply glitter on her aegyosal.

Because tonight, Hyerim had a mission.

short chapters but double update woohoo! everybody cheer!