Cinnamon Bliss | Seokjin

chapter ii. array

You cannot believe that almost a year has passed ever since that particular winter. The same winter when he first stepped foot into your quaint cafe with his daughter in his arms and laid his heart open to you. The fact that he had chosen you, a complete stranger, to confide in on one of the hardest moments in his life had completely floored you, and it had inevitably helped build an instant friendship between you and the father and daughter pair.

It had been a pleasant surprise for you when the father and daughter pair returned to your cafe just a week after their first visit. And then they kept coming in, until the visit somehow becomes a tradition that Seokjin has kept since.

For at least three times a week, they would come and spend the hour of their visit enjoying their desserts. Just like how you had always welcomed them with open arms, they surprise you by welcoming you to join them in their tiny bubble and share some of those moments together. Whenever you come by to their table—either when you drop by briefly to offer some extra cookies for Soojin or when they warmly invite you to sit with them between your breaks—you would listen to Soojin talking animatedly to both you and her father as she shares about her day. Other times, it would be the father's turn to tell his stories, giving you a glimpse of his life as a businessman and a single father, though he has always been careful not to talk about his personal life or the past with his late wife.

You cannot remember exactly when their visits had become the highlight of your day. Even Naeun could see how you would look forward to their visits without you realising it. The only thing you know for sure is that they are not the only ones who have found a friend through your encounter. Whenever they are present, and whenever you would catch the haunting gazes they share as their past and their loss are catching up to them between the laughters, you realise that you had also found the perfect companionship with them the way you never had with anyone else before.

They said wounded people would have their way to find each other and you have been telling yourself that perhaps that has been the reason why you have always been so gravitated towards them since day one. That you somehow feel like there is a void in each of your souls and you are the only ones who know how to fill that emptiness, slowly healing each other from the past hurt.

As you glance up at the time to wait for their arrival, you ignore everything that Naeun seems to be insinuating by telling yourself this. Maybe there is something more, or maybe you just enjoy being around them the same way they enjoy spending their time in your little sanctuary.

Whatever it is that makes your heart beats rapidly as you watch the seconds tick by, you let yourself believe that you are simply excited to see the little girl's smile again, and perhaps to enjoy the company of the man whose pain almost mirrors yours.

Nothing more.

✣✣✣

Seokjin listens patiently as his little girl continues to talk as they walk down the sidewalk, hand-in-hand as she keeps refusing to let him carry her. She keeps going on and on about the things that she had done today at school, about her friends, and about the fun things she had done after in the daycare center where she spent her afternoon waiting for Seokjin to pick her up.

Such a chatterbox, Seokjin wonders to himself as he watches his little daughter amusedly.

The little chatterbox who has been constantly telling her Dad just what a big girl she is now that she no longer needs to be carried.

It feels bittersweet to see how much she had grown over nearly a year. And she would keep on growing, not only because of her age but also the fact that she had been forced to experience something a child should have never gone through.