Cuts Deeper Than Love

Chapter 03: Pancakes, Bubble Tea, and Crêpes

Quietly, Ina slithered into the lecture theater and took the seat next to her good friend, Oh Sehun. Many of her classmates were already present, although few were paying attention to their professor.

"Traffic?" Sehun inquired as Ina took out her laptop, absentmindedly switching it on to get ready for the lesson.

"Nope," she answered. She were almost about to say 'clingy boyfriend' but held back and were even surprised that it would even cross her mind. "Just...something came up this morning," she ended up saying. At least that was not a lie, not really. "But it's no big deal."

Throughout the 3-hour lesson, Ina had tuned out of her professor's lecture and tuned into her own world. She did have a lot to think about. Firstly, she wanted to figure out why it did not work last night when she attempted to prepare the solution that would treat rotting fangs. She would probably have to try again tonight but it was going to be difficult because Luhan would most likely be there as well, and if he were to get in the way and raise his complaints, then that would be a problem too. And Luhan's attitude this morning, and even last night, even though he was emotional and traumatized, was also slightly alarming. It seemed he was dissatisfied with her for something she was not quite able to immediately put her finger on. He was not wrong, per se, for saying that Suho had never given her any help in the same capacity that she had for him and his kind, but it was nowhere as bad as Luhan had made him out to be. She believed in Suho's inherent kindness and swore by her own. Suho was far from a manipulator, though of course it would surely take a lot to convince Luhan to see things the way she did. And frankly she could not blame him. He had been through so much already and it still hurt her to think about his loss.

But there was more to it. There was more to Luhan's discontent. He was so insistent on making the point that he had strong romantic feelings for her, and he even called it love. He just had to go out of his way to get this message across to her — he did not actually have to, though. Because she knew it. She did. But it was so much like marking his territory that it was making her a bit uneasy. And then what was this whole thing about her forming attachments way too easily? Where did that even come from? She had not seen it coming at all, and she was not sure how to cope with his disaffection. Naturally, she wanted to 'appease' him; there had to be some misunderstanding, and she would like to have it resolved so that it would not get in the way of her relationship with him. For the longest time, she had carried so much hope that her romance with him would grow into something more solid, but things got in the way. Yet now that he was back in town, she still had the hunch that it was not going to be a smooth and easy process to get things back to the way they were. Because even if her feelings for him had not changed, nor had his for her, plenty of other things had happened while he was gone. Some of it had to do with the boy sitting right beside her right now.

She had met Sehun at the beginning of the semester, not long after Luhan and his pack had gone off the radar. It had been a couple of months, but already there was a lot of chemistry between the two of them, and it was so obvious that neither of them could deny it, which left them with the only option of recognizing it, acknowledging it, and accepting it. She had to face and deal with the natural progression of things if they were to spend more time together, that surely the sparks would just keep growing, and that did not sound like good news to her. She was even a bit taken aback by her feelings for him and tried to push them away initially, because she wanted to wait on Luhan and although she could not help her feelings for Sehun, she felt like she was betraying Luhan. Yet she also felt like she was plunging herself in remorse when she did not have to feel that way, since she and Luhan never officially got to get together, so she had no reason to remain committed to him and exclusive with him other than that she wanted to. She wanted it to be that way, and she kept wanting it to stay like this, until her heart decided it wanted somebody else as well.