Venomous // Minsung

Part 9. Promise

Listen to Z by Z's song "Searching"
for this chapter.

"Jeogiyo*, wake up! You can't sleep here."

Felix's eyes shot open at the voice that pounced on his ears out of nowhere.

A middle-aged bus driver was hovering over him with a frown. Felix stared at the unknown man open-mouthedly, unable to comprehend much through his haze. They were on a bus, it seemed, but the other seats were all empty. It was only the two of them.

Felix straightened his spine. "Where... Where are we, sir?"

"Ah, well, this is the last stop," the driver said with a smile before taking a few steps back. "We just arrived in Yongin."

"Yongin?!" Felix exploded from his seat.

Although he sucked at geography, he knew that Yongin-si was in the Gyeonggi Province, which was a lot of miles south of Seoul ─ so far away from where he lived it would take him hours to get back home.

'Why is this happening to me?!' he whined in his head. After everything that happened that day, did God really think it was necessary to make him go through this too?

"You were lucky I noticed you before I left home, young man!" the bus driver rambled, too energetically for Felix to take in. "My, you're a student, aren't you? You must've been so tired! I have a daughter your age and she always complains about school and how she's tired because..."

Felix couldn't listen anymore. He stomped outside through the open doors of the bus, which was rude, but he couldn't worry about respecting his elders at that time.

Outside, there were no tall buildings, no cars driving past, no busy street restaurants, no chatter, no music. This was nothing like Seoul; like where he lived. Fear and cold air made his skin crawl. Yongin-si was big, so why was it so... dead?

"Excuse me," he asked a passerby, his breath fogging up the night air, "do you know when the next bus to Seoul is?"

The woman looked around her. "Uh, it's already midnight..." She pointed at the other side of the street, to a bus that had just left the station. "I think that was the last one. If you want to take another bus from here, the first leaves at 5.30AM, but I recommend going downtown. There's a higher chance to find a bus there rather than on the outskirts."

Felix's stomach sank. Outskirts? How did he end up in the suburbs of Yongin?

He thanked the stranger with a bow, then turned around and bit his nails as he racked his brain for a way to get out of the mess. Usually, there would be a solution which did not include asking his family for help, but this time, if he had to resort to calling his father's drivers to get home, then so be it.

He touched his pockets in search of his phone.

But it wasn't there.

"You really think it would be a good idea to call the police right now?" Jeongin scolded, shoving Felix's phone into his own pocket. "You better calm the fuck down."