Dizzy on the Comedown

VII.

I wanna ask you,

Would you come here and spin with me?

I've been dying to catch you dizzy.

Find a way up into your head,

So I can make you feel like new again.

Something shifted between them during fall 2020.

It started on the fall break on September when he visited her in California with his friends. From then, both of them changed, little by little but still noticable.

Naura seemed to demand his presence more, which he was more than happy to comply to, but the disappointment in her voice (that she tries hard to hide) still stabs into him when he informed her that he wouldn't be coming to LA in October because his family will be coming over.

She was genuinely happy for him, he could tell. She knew how much he missed his family. So seeing her sad face after announcing to her his family cancelled their trip and he still couldn't come to California was like rubbing salt in the stab he had two days ago.

But her calling him and telling him that she got mugged in fucking New York, New York and its crazy dangerous stories was like a stab, and then someone rubbed lemon and salt on the open wound, and once it healed, the cycle starts again. And the only way it would stop was to pull her crouching figure into his hug, ensuring that she was safe and not crying and not scared and not going to be attacked by some random guy without him to help her.

"I'm scared," she says, voice muffled by the coat she got him last Christmas.

"You don't have to be scared," HJ continued to smoothen her hair, going up and down in a repeating motion. "I'm here."

As she tugged harder into his coat to hide her cry, he knew she believed him.

Naura never went to New York without informing him ahead anymore after that.

Well, technically she only went once to New York after that mugging incident, but she promised him "no putting myself in danger for you, I get it," plenty of times in the span of three months.

The one time she went against that promise was when his friends challenged her to drink HJ's drinks.

"Naura, no," he tells her. "You don't have to do what they say. They're stupid."

Naura swapped his hand, "No. I have to prove myself to them."

He sighed. "You don't have to prove you're worthy of something to anyone, Naura."

She blinked a few times, focusing herself. "That sounds like something I should've heard in high school."

"What?"

As if she was also confused by her words, she threw him a 'what?' back, before swaying her way back into the table that was filled by HJ's friends. He sighed once again, not understanding the determination this girl has within herself. It frustrates him sometimes.

"So..." Juni started. "Is the guest star ready to down this?"

He watched her gulp. He knew she could take it. He had seen her do this way too many times. But the reason on why she was doing this was his own concern. He doesn't know whether or not she was sober enough when she insisted on agreeing on this.

"Yes," she says surely. "If I can do this, you guys are cool with me being his girlfriend, right?"

His friends hollered as HJ groaned, and he had to stand behind her before she downs the soju bottle in her hand, throwing herself at him once she was finished.