Trouble

Picture

"It feels so good to eat with all of you again," I sigh, leaning away from the table as I look at all of them in turn. It had been a good two weeks since we had gotten a chance to sit, and just talk like we used to before the exams. Now that they were over, all of us were relatively less stressed. 

"I agree, during the exams I was so bored while eating lunch," Lee says, groveling about her depressing two weeks. Actually, now that I reflected on my two weeks, I had felt the same way. I had spent most of the time in the library cafeteria, trying to focus on finishing the last bit of studying while forcing myself to eat and not pass out. 

"Maybe we should go out and celebrate today?" Bora asks, her head jerking up and her eyes gleaming. 

"I can't come, I have a family dinner." Her gleamy eyes instantly dim down as I say this out loud. I apologize sheepishly. My father had planned an impromptu dinner with Tae and his mother. He had even invited Yoongi, which led me to believe it was something important. 

"How's Agust D?" I hear someone ask as I am thinking about the dinner tonight. I scrunch my eyebrows together, wondering how they knew about the injury he had suffered, but then realized they were sarcastically asking me. I look at Young's knowing smirk. I shake my head, a shy smile revealing itself. 

"He's fine," I say, slurping on the spaghetti I had taken today. 

"I know he's fine, but how is he?" Jeong asks, her eyebrows snapping together in an urgent manner. 

"I don't know what you mean," I say straightforwardly without the blink of an eye. It was true, by friends were speaking alien language right now. 

"Is he a nice kisser?" Hye Ri says in a matter-of-fact manner. Everyone gasps and turn to look at her, she shrugs. "I knew what you were talking about, I just helped her out." 

"We haven't kissed yet," I said, drinking a slurp of cold water as I try not to choke on my spaghetti. I still cough at the explicit nature of the question. 

"Stop lying...we saw the-" Na Ri's sentence is cut short as Bora and Young slap a hand over her mouth simultaneously. I look at Na Ri with a little gleam in my eye, now. 

"What did you see?" I ask in a low, steady voice. I was interested in this. 

"Well, nothing. Na Ri doesn't know what she's talking about," Lee laughed nervously, mumbling about something else under her breath. I narrow my eyes. 

"Don't lie," I say, rather hypocritically. 

"Eun In, it's nothing-" Hye Ri begins, a cautious expression on her face. I ignore her and continue to glare at Na Ri. She shudders under my gaze. 

"Some of Agust D's fans saw you together at the park...together." I wondered what park she was talking about. 

"The Rainbow bridge park," Young clarified. I thought back to what had happened at the park. I didn't really remember anything happening. I mean, we had a few drinks, and then we had talked. Had something else happened that was worth notice? 

Something tugged on one of the strands of my memory as I tried my hardest to find where it led. 

It kept going to something quite disturbing. 

A kiss? 

What kiss? 

A kiss!

Had I kissed him? 

"What did the picture show?" I asked slowly. My friends visibly grew more anxious. 

"Eun- don't...don't feel bad. These fans are a bit extreme anyway." 

Bora opens her phone and begins to scan through, her finger swiping this way and that. She clears her throat as she lands on the thing she is supposed to be looking for. 

"This is why I tell you to have social media..." Bora mumbles her breath as she slides the phone across. I shoot daggers at her. 

I look at the picture on the screen and something sinks into my stomach, making my heart stop.

 -

I laugh at whatever had tickled the funny bone of everyone else at the table. My head wasn't even following the conversation anymore. The only thing that floated in my vision was the damned picture. Suddenly, I heard my name in the conversation and my attention was diverted to the people around me. 

"Don't you want to congratulate Suga, my new artist?" Dad asked me. I scrunched my eyebrows, looking from dad to Yoongi and back. I smiled a little, at the wide grin that was rested on Yoongi's, but apart from that, I had never been more confused in my life. 

"Congratulations..." I said, looking at Tae, then, who was giving the googly eyes to Yoongi. 

"What..." I guess he was planning to ask me what was wrong with me but he didn't get a chance because my dad began to vigorously shake his arm. 

"There really won't be any dancing, so you can relax. I want my company to focus on what's important for my artists: music." He said, a loud laugh reverberating throughout the room. He began to introduce Yoongi to Tae's mother, and they exchanged pleasantries, during which I was wondering just when my life had gotten so tangled up. 

- 

"Is everything okay?" Yoongi asked, a slight happiness to his voice that I had failed to notice before. And because of this happiness, I didn't want to tell him yet...I didn't want to tell him this entire week, in fact. He was so happy, that I did not want to see him worried again.

"Everything is okay for now," I said, clutching his bruised knuckle to check if everything was okay...and to have something to hold on to. 

"I'm really happy for you," I say, looking at the knuckle more than his intense gaze. He looks at the piece of paper in his other hand and lets out a laugh. 

"I have enough money to pay away the debt, you know. I can give the rest to my family, and...and, I'm done." He said it with so much finality that I felt a smile come onto my face. 

"You can focus only on music now," I said, brushing my thumb across the knuckle and then dropping it. He looked at the contract, still smiling like a five-year-old boy looking at a toy car. 

"And you..." He whispered. 

I smiled at him as he looked at the contract. 

Me? 

His fans hated me. 

That picture. That damned picture. 

I hadn't remembered the fact that I had kissed him while drunk in the park. And I had also forgotten that Yoongi was famous. And that his fans recognized him in public. And if they recognized him and saw a girl kissing him, things weren't going to go exactly well. 

The comments kept coming back to me. 

I hate her. 

She's so ugly. 

What does he see in her? 

He's mine. 

Don't ever go talking to him again, *****. 

Everything that I hated being, the pretty girl, the girl who boys like, the girl who boys talk to, THAT girl...I had become just that for around 1.5 million people, and I didn't know how to tell him this. 

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