afterglow

chapter four

Wheein stared at the clock hanging on the wall. It's 10:57 pm, and Taehyung was heavily sleeping beside her. He was knocked out with meds, and luckily, he's still very much alive when she helped him climb up the staircase to his bedroom. He snuggled under the thick blankets, and it only took him a second before finally succumbing to sleep.

They're alone in the big house, and Wheein was left to take care of him, which was not a big deal after all. The patient was pretty much hibernating, snug like a baby. He's surrounded by pillows and tucked in a thick blanket. Peace was just all over his cute face, and it also didn't help that he's cuddling a huge pillow.

Wheein scoffed at the innocently looking man beside her. "He may be cute, but he still hates me."

Because Taehyung was taking a lot of space on the bed, she can only sit near the edge, hugging her one knee, while having the leg suffering from the wound lay flat before her.

She still couldn't believe so many things happened today. She even felt like she's a damsel in distress in a fairytale. She was set on an adventure to find something sacred, in this case, her friends, or save herself. But her carriage broke down, and she's cursed by her evil stepmother, disguised as a fairy godmother, making her fall and drown.

Wheein sighed and propped her chin on her knee. She gazed outside the window to the seas and the snow swirling together with the strong wind. The moonlight, no matter how weak, was enough to light up the dark room. Everything was just so calm and romantic and nostalgic, it's making her think she's seen this exact same scene in her head. Realizing that, a weird sense of déjà vu came up to her. She's been here, she thought. The bed, the lamps, the cabinets, the windows, all of these things made her feel as if she has looked at these same things and felt the same calming feeling, but she thought so did the other rooms. So Wheein pushed it at the back of her mind. She's just too bored that she's making things up in her head.

To fill the boredom, she picked up her phone on the bedside table and opened all her social media apps, but nothing could pick her interest. She wanted to go back to her room and lay down and read or sleep, but she's stuck in this little space, just watching him hibernate in peace, and she couldn't even blame him. It's all her fault in the first place.

"No one asked you to save me," she muttered under her breath, looking at him. "You shouldn't have looked for me. I was acting like a baby. You were right all along."

She sighed again, but thinking about how he said she's a pushover when he didn't even know a single thing about her, she's starting to get mad again and want to put tiny little buds of cotton under his nose to block his breathing.

She's never been this conflicted in her life.

To pass the time and with a renewed spirit of doing whatever she wanted, she sat up straight and scooted backward to the headboard and opened her book reader in her phone. Taehyung was sleeping anyways, he wouldn't know.

There was no time in Wheein's little world when she's reading. Page after page, scroll by scroll, every letter on the tiny bright screen has consumed her. She's possessed by every character, their movements, emotions, and feelings. She's not just a reader. In her head, these typewritten words were projected like a film montage. Studying numbers might have been killing her brain, but the sensuality in reading has made her imagination alive and run wild. There's no greater pleasure than this, to be feeling someone else's senses as if they're your own, to make someone unreal breathe into you and live their own. Erotica, it's more than just the stimulation or arousal. It's all about feeling alive, however momentarily in such an imagined world. Wheein knew that, and she's so lost in taking pleasure in it.

So lost in her world she didn't even notice she's finally lying down on her back. So lost she didn't even notice that Taehyung has woken up and has been reading with her.