Winter Hearts

Return

Leo looked out of the car window.

He had walked straight out to the car after hanging up with his parents and taken the back seat, feeling a little like he needed to hide. The boys had piled in after him, but he had given N such a look as he had tried to get into the row of seats in front of him, that N had fallen back and let the others go in. He ended up sitting in front, with Min Seok who was driving.

He didn't want to be asked how his chat with his parents went.

Although it hadn't been that bad, the undertones of disappointment that he had sensed in his father's voice were palpable to him - even though his father had pretty much said that it was his life and that he should do what he thinks is right.

His mother on the other hand, seemed to be trying to hold back from asking about Siana.

He could sense a multitude of questions which she wasn't asking, as they broached the subject of the video clips they had seen, and he took it upon himself to just lay it all out there, all the information he thought his mother would be interested in. Thankfully they had only seen the clip that Hyuk had seen, and he wondered if he should warn her about the other headlines that she hadn't seen yet, but he decided that could wait.

He reeled off a checklist of facts that he thought she might want to know about: how they met, where she lived and whether she was Korean.

The only thing he hadn't really talked about was how they were so intimate so soon. In public.

She didn't seem to mind that, in fact, was rather caught up in the romance of it all, unlike his father, who seemed brusque about it.

"It is surprising that in all this time you hadn't met anyone til you left home," she said, which had struck him as surprising of himself too. He had met plenty in the industry, maybe not any that he had taken home to meet them during his idol career. But nothing had ever seemed to have the possibility of permanence, not like this.

He wondered if, as his mother suggested, being away from home had anything to do with how hard he had fallen for Siana - that she wasn't from his industry, that she only had a little in common with him culturally, socially.

Now, as they approached Arachova and began the tortuously slow progress through its narrow main street, he had thought enough about it to figure that perhaps there was some truth in it - more to do with being free of the usual restrictions being back home had, and less to do with not finding anyone on his wavelength. After all, there had been many women he had come across through work or through his circle of friends back home who were of the same mind as him. Just somehow, not this kind of attraction.

But that was not all that had made this so different. Siana didn't seem to hanker after him the way he felt the ladies he had even an inkling of a mutual attraction for did. Perhaps it was his own standoffish behaviour at the start that had caused her reticence in the beginning. Her shyness, or more correctly, her reserved, poised behaviour towards him.

He wondered for a second, who her bias in Vixx actually was, and whether, if it was him, she would admit to it. She had given off the impression that Ken or N was, from her initial reactions to them.

He remembered the jealousy with which he had observed her, as she watched Ken approaching her from across the room that first morning in the studio.

Practically devoured him with her eyes, he thought. And practically ignored me.

He glanced at the back of Ken's head, wondering how he must have looked at her to captivate her so. 

Actor, he thought to himself, peevishly.