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Jongin figured that he must have fallen ill.
He just had to be unwell.
That had to be the most plausible theory for why he was having these odd thoughts about the blonde haired girl sitting across from him, who just so happened to be his best friend of 11 plus years. Park Chaeyoung or Rosie, as he liked to call her, was suddenly changing from someone he always viewed as family to something much more and he didn't know how to handle it.
Coincidentally, they were hanging out in their neighborhood park, the very place where they first met as young kids. They started off not liking each other, mainly because Jongin made it his job to constantly pester her and pull every prank he could think of. Eventually, he had went too far and tripped her up, leaving her with an injured knee. Much to Rosé's surprise, despite her cries for him to leave her alone, he picked her up, hauled her on his back, and carried her all the way to her house.
Even when Rosé's parents had come to the door and took their daughter inside to tend to her wound, he remained by her side, his gaze fierce and protective much to the amusement of her father. Afterwards, he apologized to the her and they made a pinky promise to not be mean to each other.
Soon enough, they went from hating each other to being like two peas in a pod, rarely ever seeing one of them without the other. If they didn't play together at the park then they played together in each other's yards which was more convenient since they lived across the street from one another. Their parents got along well too so it became a habit for them to all eat dinner together every once in a while. It was during those times that they never failed to tease Jongin about making Rosé hurt her knee, much to his dismay.
While it wasn't something he wasn't proud of now that he was much older, he knew that if it hadn't happened, they wouldn't have become best friends and he was thankful to have her in his life. As they grew up, they realized that reality wasn't all sunshine and rainbows as it seemed when they were younger, especially for Jongin.
His father, one of the nicest men that you could ever meet, had fallen ill due to cancer and by Jongin's first year in middle school, he had passed away. That year had been the worst for him and he barely had any motivation for anything anymore. And yet, Rosé had been with him through it all and was his sunshine on both his good and bad days. And his mother simply adored her, becoming her gardening buddy on the weekends. Just as he had lost someone precious to him, he felt that he had also gained someone who proved to be just as precious. She had become like his family.
So why couldn't Jongin stop thinking about how beautiful she looked under the rays of the sun that was shining proudly over them? And it wasn't in a brotherly way but in a way that let him know that he was starting to view her as a woman.
He wondered if it was because she dyed her hair. She had been trying out different colors last year with Lisa, another close friend of hers. Although she had been able to beautifully pull off every hair color she tried, Jongin strongly preferred her raven locks because of the way it contrasted against her skin and he liked the way it shined in the light whenever they walked to the park together.
