My Client's Former Best Friend | MEANIE/MINWON

Chapter Nineteen.

  Mingyu went back to his apartment. In times of great upheaval and stress, a man needed his home. His home was his castle. But when he heaved himself through the scratched white door that always stuck, the sight within was less than comforting.

  “This place is a dump,” he said to the piles of dirty clothes and dishes in his path. He stood in the doorway, surveying his garbage can of a castle. Something inside of him snapped. He could either leave, walk away from his mess, and pretend it didn’t exist, or he could stay and deal with it. There was nowhere to walk to. He couldn’t handle Junhui’s drama, and he’d burned his bridge to Wonwoo. The sad truth of it was, he had no one else to turn to. No other friends. His family—was he not speaking to them, or had they cut him off? Both were likely, and either way, they were unavailable.

  He hadn’t noticed before that he lived in such squalor. Junhui had told him as much a few nights back when he’d arrived to pick up Mingyu for their sleepover. This new awareness could be because, apart from the pain meds he’d left at Junhui’s, he hadn’t had anything in the past twenty-four hours. Not a drop of liquor. He was perfectly, horribly sober, staring at the manifestation of his shitty life.

  He began to clean. This wasn’t an eighties movie montage with friends and a great soundtrack. It was grueling, silent, and long. His iPod was broken and he was alone.

  Once the clothes and dishes were cleared and the empty whiskey bottles and beer cans recycled, he found his layer of discarded drafts. The sequel to The Night Before the Apocalypse, now so long overdue he’d been dropped by the studio and his agent, abandoned by the few fans he had, and rejected by the guy he loved. The last didn’t have anything to do with his film, but it seemed fitting to include in his laundry list of life failures.

  He stuffed the crumpled pieces of paper in a bag and tied it closed. This wasn’t one of those moments when he would unfold his work and begin to read with a heavy heart, only to find that the words on the page weren’t half as bad as he’d dreaded. That the script only needed tweaking to become the next great thing. No, this was one of those moments when he decided enough was enough. That script would never get written. He hadn’t written for days, and he didn’t miss it now. That had to be some sort of a sign.

  By his bed he found a couple of condom wrappers. He couldn’t remember when they were from or who he’d been with. Great. He added banging random guys and not remembering it to his failure list.

  On the bed were all of his books. At some point in his drunken slump he’d started sleeping with them, wrapping them around him like an uncomfortably hard and pointy-edged cocoon. Every zombie novel ever written. His collector’s edition of Frankenstein. Some contemporary mysteries, some classics, some non-fictions about travel and living in the wild. Plus his well-worn chemistry texts, beloved yet abandoned.

  Mingyu put the books back on the empty shelves, turning over each one as he did. They were his grown-up teddy bears. They had been his only comfort when his life had bottomed out. It was time to be an adult again and put them away.

  The sheets crinkled when he pulled them back. He almost vomited.

  As he put the final touches on his cleaned abode, his cell phone rang. It was charging by the couch in the living room, and he lunged for it, hoping against hope someone had changed his mind and wanted him back. It was Junhui.

  “Where are you?”

  Mingyu sank down on his couch with his disappointment. “I’m at my place.”

  “Oh. Why?”

  Mingyu shrugged. Stupid. He was talking on the phone. “I needed to take a step back, and it seemed like you and Seungcheol had everything under control.”