Growing up together, you had always thought that he would always be a part of your life forever, until he suddenly chose a different path, leaving you altogether in the shadows of your past. What happens when you finally decide to move on, to walk d...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
White Lies
chapter iii. half-truths
We can help each other.
Sometimes, Taehyung could still hear that old conversation running in his head whenever he closed his eyes. He had been so young, completely lost and in dire need of guidance back then that he had taken every word Mina had given him as the answer to his prayers.
Looking back on that moment today, Taehyung couldn't decide whether it had been a blessing or a curse that it had happened at all. He thought that he was ready to face the consequences and to get through all of the sacrifices that he had to take. But clearly, he was wrong.
"The first step to redemption would be to tell her the whole truth," he remembered Seokjin said to him. He had to admit that he owed it to Seokjin for helping him in keeping his secrets, even if he also knew that his friend had never once enjoyed doing it.
And none of this would have happened if I had heeded his warnings years ago either.
Taking a deep breath, Taehyung recalled everything and slowly began to reveal everything that he had kept hidden from you for years. Starting from the day he first saw Mina when she began riding the same bus to school as the one you and Taehyung did. The way he was curious and excited to see someone new, and how he had hidden the real intention behind his first approach to her so well that you had read it as a crush, an attraction, something more than what it truly was.
"When we first met her, she had just moved into town. It was easy to notice how hard it had been for her to make friends, so I decided to say hi," he said with an awkward chuckle. "You were there, so you knew when it happened."
You said nothing and simply nodded, allowing him to continue. "That was really all there was to it. I just wanted to introduce myself, ask her to be friends and hang out with us, since we were going to the same school and went on the same ride every morning."
But then he fell silent, unable to tell you that he had also pictured how he was going to draw her in his sketchbooks, to have her to model for him. Nobody had truly known about his new interest in creating art and painting back then. He was too shy to share it with the people around him and was too insecure to show it to the world that he had done all he could to hide it from everyone, including you.
When he raised his head to look at you, he remembered thinking that the only girl he had ever wanted to draw was you. He still wanted to, so badly, but he never had the courage to show his drawings to you, much less to ask if you would ever want to be his model. And yet, he also couldn't find it in himself to ask anyone else to do it for him when he couldn't even muster the courage to show his work. Not when the only things he had ever drawn before had been nothing but little animals, parts of the nature that he saw from around him, and other inanimate objects that he could find then.
