HELLBOUND [Liskook]

Chapter 3 Reason

As she left the city, Lisa's mind began to wander.

She was already twenty-two and still never had a boyfriend. She grew up within a peaceful, loving family and she had grown up into a really good girl. Some even compared her to an untainted snow, well-mannered and pure, but most mocked her, calling her, Miss goody-two-shoes or little Miss Priss.

As she was growing up, Lisa had gotten used to other people mocking her but her grandparents always encouraged and advised her to not let the water around her enter her ship, otherwise, she would drown. She had been raised to keep a positive mindset and she herself decided that there was no way she would let those kinds of people drown her.

She had a reason for why she had never had a boyfriend in her twenty-two years of existence. When she was seventeen, she realized that she had developed a trauma – she was afraid of having someone fall in love with her.

Lisa had witnessed just how much her father suffered day by day, even years after her mother died. It was unbearable for her to even watch him. Her father loved her mother so much that even after nearly two decades her death, she still saw her dad crying at night, looking at his wife's photo. She had seen just how painful it was to lose someone you loved through her father – it was nothing but torture. She even once heard her father saying that he didn't feel alive anymore since that day her mother died. She knew that her father was only holding on because of her.

Years after her mother's death, Lisa was diagnosed with the same illness that killed her mother. It appeared that she inherited the illness from her and since then, she'd been battling with it. She was only seventeen that time and she knew that just like her mother, she only had 5 more years to live.

That was why she always rejected the boys who showed any interest in her. There were a few of them but her fear would always be triggered especially when someone confessed to her. All she could say to them was 'sorry'. Due to that, Lisa avoided boys as much as she could. She even purposely dressed quite unfashionably in order to become less attractive.

However, as years passed by, Lisa started to question herself. 'Will I die just like this?'

The desires that she had been suppressing all this time were getting out of control. She had been dreaming of wanting to experience how it would feel like to love someone. She wanted to know how it would feel to have butterflies in one's stomach, and how it would feel to kiss and embrace that person you loved with all your heart, romantically. She had read many webnovels and she couldn't help but wish she could at least experience this so called love before she died. That was her only wish – to fall in love, to find someone she could fall in love with.

But she was torn. She was afraid and worried sick. She didn't want to leave someone behind to suffer when she was gone. She didn't want anyone to experience the loss and pain her father was going through until now.

For years, she'd been thinking about it and she thought she had already accepted her fate but now that her due date was getting closer, the desire in her heart only kept on getting stronger. So she decided to be brave and try her best to make her wish come true with the little time she had left.

The only way she could think of to fulfill her wish was – to find a man whom she could fall in love with but would never fall in love with her. She had heard and read stories about one sided love. She heard and read that that kind of love was excruciatingly painful but… she still wanted it. If this was the only way for her to experience falling in love, she would be willing to throw herself in it, even if it meant being hurt. She thought that she could handle the pain of loving someone who didn't love her back more, than dying without knowing what love felt like at all. Perhaps, she was thinking about the quote she once read when she was eighteen that said, 'It is better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all'.

Lisa once anonymously shared her situation online and asked about what to do. Her thread garnered lots of attention and different contradicting reactions occurred.

"Since you don't want someone to fall in love with you, then why don't you go and pick a random bad guy? I mean, there are a lot of jerks and heartless idiots out there who only know how to break hearts." Was one of the advice she wanted to try. But what if that supposedly heartless someone would fall for her in the end?

Lisa still had a year left.

She was doing fine for now. The people around her, except her family didn't even know that she was sick. But her mother was like this back then, too. Lisa somehow knew that her health would start to worsen in the fifth year – this year. She could even foresee that she might have to start going back and forth from the hospital in the next month or two. She was aware that she didn't have much time left.