Let Me Protect You (Sahyo)

Chapter 20

In the next few weeks after the statement was published, there was a day when everyone held their breaths in the office for a minute, when a delivery man knocked on the company doors to deliver a pizza that nobody ordered. It turned out that it was the wrong address, and it was then that the mood in the office slowly crept back to normal.

During the short hiatus, the Academy sent a small team to Seoul, juniors that Jihyo requested for and trusted, forming the extra security detail that they couldn't risk not having. The company tried to clean up the fallout of all those last-minute cancellations and dropping out of events, slowly but surely stacking up Sana's schedule again.

The new security team spent the weeks tightening their safety measures, and the staff at the company had the time to ease Sana back into work, getting promotions in order and putting schedules together. It almost felt like any other hiatus between shoots and projects.

It was almost as if that day didn't happen. Almost.

But then some nights, it was Sana who would wake up drenched in sweat, crying and reaching for her girlfriend across the bed.

"I was just sitting there, I was awake but I think I was dead, I-" She choked out the words in between gasps of breaths, as she tried focusing on Jihyo 's soothing pats on her hair. "I was watching you and Momo cry, you were crying so much and I couldn't hold you or comfort you, all I could do was watch."

Jihyo 's heart constricted tightly in her chest. Was this what it felt like being in sana's shoes, holding her through all her nightmares? Because it hurt like a physical wound, seeing the girl take pained intakes of air as she tried to calm down. She did everything Sana did for her, wrapping her up in an embrace, grounding her back to the safety of their room with whispered words against her ears.

Finally, the panic that was in sana's eyes was washed out with an exhausted daze. Jihyo released her slightly, pulling back an inch until sana's face came into focus.

"Better?" She asked, pushing back the sweat-soaked fringe from the older girl's forehead.

"Can we talk about something?" sana replied after a brief moment of hesitation. It was 2am, she was exhausted, but that thought that had been nagging away at her refused to let her rest. Jihyo could see the conflict in her pleading eyes, so she nodded, and sana spoke, looking at a spot past her shoulder, anywhere but back at her.

"Do you think, maybe, we're going too fast?" She saw the face of utter confusion in the blurry corner of her eye, and she paused for an even longer time, picking and choosing her words even more carefully. "Sujeong was important to you, wasn't she? At some point you must have loved her a lot, and do you think that maybe, just maybe, you haven't given yourself enough time to grieve?"

"I had my doubts. I doubted myself about this too, I kept questioning myself if this is fair to you. But I know that I've moved on. Ever since that night at Huangpu river, I know for a fact that I've moved on." Jihyo answered so quickly that it surprised even herself, and she thought that she sounded surer than she felt.

sana stared unblinkingly at her as she spoke, watching the night sky reflect back into Jihyo's eyes, just like that night at the river.

"I only asked this because... Sometimes it feels like, I'm your last chance , that because you haven't fully healed from losing her, that I hold too much... control. That I don't want. That if anything happened you would never, ever stand back up again. Ji I know you're strong but, this thought scares me."

"Sha..."

"I know, I know, not to talk about possibly dying and shit but fuck, Ji, just what if that happened? At first I thought it was just a matter of you not having moved on properly, that maybe I was just a rebound, and I was willing to just keep trying to be enough for you. I was happy to just have you and try to love you until one day you properly loved me back. But then I see you in those dreams, breaking, because I was your last chance at being vulnerable to love."