crack in the mirror | gayeon 🪞

-21-

The following day, he got himself on his feet strangely early, and disappeared from the Hut as quickly as he had woken up. Before having a chance to even get a glimpse of the world through the window, he was met with Gunil. With his stern, but warm voice, and a gentle smile.

"Well, Jooyeon," he greeted him, tying an apron around his waist, probably getting ready to cook something for breakfast, as Jooyeon assumed. "You are up already."

"As you can see," he sent him a smile in response, reaching out for a brown jacket that he had hung over the chair some time ago. Gunil turned on the fire and put the pan in its place, looking out at the boy slowly dressing up close to him.

"I didn't know you were going out." Jooyeon hummed something in response, and leaned over to pick up a pair of his (once again brown) shoes. "With someone?"

"No," he replied and went over to Gunil, looking for something to grab and eat while walking to the train station. "I'm going out alone."

"Really?"

"Really." An apple. That was his choice. He picked the one without any dark spots or with a weird texture (this was something that mattered to him in apples more than anything else, if the apple was soft, he wouldn't even touch it, let alone take a bite).

"So," Gunil turned himself around just to take a look at the boy who almost ran to take his bag with himself. It was a weird type of rush, one that made Gunil a bit suspicious and one that made him very curious. "Where are you going? You didn't say anything."

"To the town." Jooyeon shrugged his shoulders, and Gunil obviously did not like the answer, and so did Jooyeon... but telling him the truth sounded a little bit too hard to manage, as well as slowing down his pace. He didn't want anyone else in the living room now and especially not Jiseok. He couldn't just look at him now. And the boy was particularly the reason why he had woken up so early, and decided not to waste time even on eating inside.

"Wow," Gunil scoffed and shook his head sideways, looking back to the pan. "You can tell me anything, you know?"

"Totally," he looked at him, thinking that by doing so Gunil would finally stop asking him any more questions, and to his surprise he did, he may have hesitated for a second or two, but as Jooyeon slowly made his way to the front door, he gave up, knowing that it was already a lost cause, and Jooyeon was going to get to his very secretive destination.

And Jooyeon may have made Gunil a bit irritated, but he was outside, walking on the ground and breathing the fresh air, and most importantly, did not see Jiseok.

As much as he loved spending time with him, he just could not do this now. Not when, as he thought, they had almost kissed. And to him, he sounded like a moron thinking that he had panicked before kissing Jiseok, because they had already done that, so doing so shouldn't be this hard... well, it was. It was incredibly hard.

Kisses weren't a meaningless thing in his head, and if he could, he would have kissed him, but at that specific moment, he got nervous like an idiot. Stress took over his body, and he looked away, clenching his hands on his trousers as if what was about to happen was the worst thing one could ever imagine.

In fact, it was not the worst thing. Thinking about many other alternatives this one started to sound like something amazing, something that no one sane would call bad. And Jooyeon was one of these people. When he thought about it never ever would he call it a terrible or obnoxious thing, to him it sounded pretty. Exorbitantly pretty.

So now, looking at Jiseok seemed like the hardest thing in the whole world. What if Jiseok thought of him as a brat or simply an idiot just as Jooyeon did the moment he looked away? And he, himself, simply couldn't imagine talking or looking at Jiseok after having done that.