Crumbling Bridges {YuJae} | complete

fifteen

After getting excited and nearly posting yesterday, here's the new chapter haha

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"He called me a bitch."

Hyejin sits back against the sofa, cross-legged on the carpet, and fiddles with her necklace with her free hand. She's painting her nails a dark crimson to match the red highlights in her hair. Twisting the star-shaped beads, she waves her other hand in the air to help the polish dry and squints at the television.

"Oh dear." Johnny looks up from his phone, voice flat but amused all the same. Jaehyun whacks his shoulder and shoots a glare, because he knows exactly what's going through his mind.

"So I stomped on his toes." Hyejin's mouth twists into a proud smile. "Got his fancy Nike trainers all muddy."

"The ones you bought him?" Jaehyun asks.

"Dunno. Probably."

"Retaliation isn't always the best way forward, sweetie." Jaehyun wraps the weighted blanket tighter around his shoulders and reaches down to where the girl is sat on the floor in front of him to help her tuck some stray hair behind her ears. "You need to talk it out."

"I don't need to talk about anything." Hyejin insists. She blows on her fingernails, then shuffles towards the coffee table to apply a second coat.

Jaehyun watches her, no longer interested in The Fellowship of the Ring, and notes the way her tongue pokes out a little as she inspects the evenness of the nail polish. Red is her new obsession. She went shopping with Ningning the previous day and returned with a pair of Converse, an array of crop tops, even some eyeliner and lip gloss, all in various shades of red. When she pulled the hair dye from the bag, Jaehyun convinced her to settle for highlights; school would never allow her to go all the way, and Jaehyun nearly got called in for another meeting to discuss her latest violation of the uniform rules when she wore the new shoes all week. The colour suits her, though, especially when he plaited her hair yesterday morning. It's better to see red streaks in her plaits than red sparks of anger in her eyes.

"Treading on his toes isn't very mature, is it?" Johnny speaks again. This time, he doesn't look up from his twitter feed, and Jaehyun tries not to giggle at how invested he is in a heated discussion over the Kardashians.

"I think you need a full run-down of what happened." Hyejin slaps her hands on her knees. The man looks down at her with pursed lips, seeming uninterested, but from the slight twitch in his eyebrows Jaehyun can tell he cares deep down. Judging from the way he asks about how the girl is doing every morning at work, Jaehyun knows he wants to hear all the details so he can go to Donghyuck's house and beat him up. Well, give him a stern talking to; Johnny would never put his muscles to such use.

"Go on then." Johnny nods for the girl to explain. Jaehyun pulls his knees to his chest and huddles into the blanket to listen to the story for the umpteenth time.

"Basically, when all the shitty divorce stuff was happening I wasn't in school a lot, so I didn't have friends or anything. But Donghyuck would always speak to me and he was always really nice. Was, might I say." Hyejin twists the lid on the bottle of nail polish and slams it back on the table hard enough for everyone to flinch. "So we got closer. I'd go to his house when I didn't want to go to school, and he'd buy me lunch if I didn't have money." That part pinches Jaehyun's chest in a particularly sensitive spot, sadness and guilt weeping out of the wound all over again. He'd forfeit his own lunch so she could have money if it was a particularly tough week. Johnny gives him a brief frown. "He asked me out, like, a year and a bit ago? And things were great. Then last week he had to audacity to just text me out of nowhere and say he wants a break because he doesn't know if he's serious about the relationship anymore."