TENDAE

5.1

(epilogue - the story on his side)
(Hanbin)

We first met when I was fifteen, and he was sixteen. I was so intimidating, that he called me hyung for at least another month before realizing that I was in fact a year younger.

People might assume that he was dumb. Sure, he was never book smart, and if you used a mathematical problem to assess him, then you might never find out how crazily confident he was on one hand, and how surprisingly gentle he could be on the other hand. He never seemed to be the most diligent person in the room, or the sharpest tool in the shed, but the moment you got to look into his eyes, or listened to what he had to say, he would instantly blow your mind, with his charming smile and an amazingly sharp wit.
That was how I instantly knew, the very moment I laid my eyes on him, that he was gonna be someone I wanted to stick around with for a long, long time.

I used to be so prideful with my pseudonym on stage, B.I, be I, a name reminding me to never forget who I originally came from. Yet he never really called me B.I. He might scream on the top of his lung, "Kim Hanbin!!!", when he needed to wake me up. He might whisper ever so softly, "Hanbinnie", when he wanted to calm my tantrum down. He might just blurt out, "Hanbin ah", when we were busy sitting in silence for hours side by side. I guessed I was always Hanbin in his eyes. And if I had to be completely honest? I never minded that he called me Hanbin. It made me feel somewhat weaker, knowing that my greatest facade wouldn't work with him. Yet somehow, it made me so much stronger, knowing that no matter how intimidating I was to the world, at the end of the day, in his eyes, I might just be as endearing as the way he pronounced my name, "Hanbin".

We used to be kids with empty pockets. We used to have nothing on hands, yet with a pen, a stack of notes with crazily messy handwritings of ours and the smallest corner in the largest building on the street, the great big world suddenly belonged to just the two of us. I could never remember exactly how we filled up dozens of stacks of paper together during those days, but I was certain that it was of the very few things I missed about being young and reckless.

He was only a year older than me, I didn't address him as a hyung so often and we could have easily become friends instead. But he always treated me as though I was at least five years younger than him. If he only had one dollar in his pocket and I told him I was hungry, he would actually spend his last dollar on me and bring me an energy bar in less than fifteen minutes. He never had to, but he always tried to give me everything that he had, even though that meant leaving himself with nothing. I never understood how his mind worked and how he could be so selfless, yet I was too busy enjoying the love and care he showered me with to even once question his kindness.

We lived together, for a good four years, and then on this one fine day, I suddenly realized that I prefered his smile to the rest of the world. He didn't have a dimple on his cheek, nor were his eyes twinkling when he smiled. Heck, sometimes I couldn't even see his eyes when he smiled, but that was never a problem. The moment a grin started to spread across his face, the rest of the world instantly faded away, and only the twinkling happiness in his eyes could radiate through my soul. There was always something so soothing yet intoxicating about the way he looked at me and smiled. One moment, I felt like I was in the safest place in the world, that was, right beside him. The next, my heart was beating like crazy as if it were hanging on the edge of a cliff.

It never took me that long to admit that I fell for him. There was not one good enough reason for me to put myself through the trouble of denying my feelings. So what? I liked a boy, it was no big deal. Instead of stumbling away from the one person I wanted the most, why couldn't I just indulge myself a tad bit longer in his warm embrace? Maybe, maybe if I didn't try so hard to fight back my feelings, all the things I had ever felt for him might eventually turn out to be nothing.
Or so I thought.