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CHAPTER SEVEN ( I Bet On Losing Dogs )
DESPITE THE MANY times Cha Jaehwa tries to convince herself that she is mentally fortified enough, meeting Ahn Suho is about as nerve-wracking as crossing paths with a speeding train.
Small droplets of perspiration prickle her clammy palms and dot the base of her back, and the wind comes in an all too beckoning flutter of leaves and leaves Jaehwa shivering in an attempt to preserve what warmth she can.
Autumn is finally coming to an end, and it seems Winter greets Jaehwa with open arms, gifting her a carcass filled of flowers and thorns — Ahn Suho.
Their collision is a coincidence, a one-in-a-million probability for the two to meet again in such an unsettling stage, bristling trees embracing their cold arms.
They meet in the middle of everything; And Jaehwa has a fleeting memory of a boy, a visage of scorching sun and a bright grin standing before her, perhaps a few years short of fifteen, snaggle-toothed and warm, and Jaehwa melts until she is nothing more than sticky water beneath the summer-seared pavement.
Ahn Suho is a grim carcass of fleeting smiles and gentle words. He stands the way the old and weary do — As though he is grasping onto life with the last of his strength.
( Perhaps he is. Jaehwa had always known Ahn Suho far more than she would ever know herself ).
That all too familiar banner whips and flails against the breeze, and Jaehwa claws the sweater against her skin tighter — As though it would hold her bones together, keep her from falling apart.
Her fingers subconsciously reach up to the ugly scar on the back of her head, and she parts her hair to hide it away from the world. From Ahn Suho.
The school is bleak and silent. All its inhabitants rot away within its dim walls and tear their bodies apart in attempts to become what their parents and country expect them to become — But all that amounts to is cigarette-stained fingers and blood-smeared lips.
Jaehwa has the aching sense of feeling that she too had been the same.
Ahn Suho does not smile. It twists something terrible in the pit of Jaehwa's stomach, and the picture she had so clearly drawn in her head slowly begins to fade.
( She clings onto it desperately, for she knows of loss, and she does not want to lose what little she can salvage ).
"Ahn Suho." Cha Jaehwa breathes his name like the breeze, and it weaves through the cold day to settle upon the boy's ears in a bittersweet melody.
Oh, how he misses the sound of her voice.
"Are you avoiding me?" Suho's voice is raspy — Perhaps a cold, or lack of moisture in his drying mouth — But Jaehwa relishes in the gentle thrum that such a timbre brings to her heart.
