The Way You'd Loved Her | winrina

Chapter 2

I had a great time last night.

W.

"Oh my god, you're banging Hyunjin."

"You really need to rethink your whole relationship if you have that little trust in him," Karina fires back easily, grabbing the card out of Somi's hands and reading it again.

'I had a great time last night.' Somehow, she's absolutely sure Winter didn't even think of the dual meaning when she neatly signed what looks to be outrageously expensive piece of paper and put it in the bouquet, the size of which was toeing the line between charming and obnoxious. Karina squints at it, holds it up with one hand, barely hiding an amused smile. Lilies. The only flowers she's sure she isn't allergic to, as she's told Winter yesterday.

So she's the type to remember things. Interesting.

"Yeah, and Chae," Giselle pipes up from where she's lounging on Karina's couch, "Hyunjin was with you last night. The entire night. I know because we're roommates with really thin walls. Can I start looking for another apartment please?"

"Besides," Karina says again, eyes still on the card. "I have a boyfriend."

"Ah, yes," says Somi, plopping next to Giselle onto the couch and eyeing Karina. "The one and only Jeno Lee, the love of your life."

"That was a little excessive."

Somi shrugs. "You get the point."

Karina puts the bouquet down on the coffee table carefully, and then sighs, turning to face her best friends since high school. Giselle Yu and Somi Won, always up to no good, always in pair. Karina wasn't always the part of the trio. She remembers Giselle punching her in the face back in school - with perfectly good reasons, but it still hurt like a bitch. She remembers Somi hating her guts freshman year - a feeling that intensified when her older brother went through 'a Karina Yu stage', as Giselle put it. She must have done something right when she turned him down, at least in Somi's eyes, since they've become tentative friends after that.

Not that she would've accepted Julien Won's advances if Somi wasn't there. She was barely seventeen, and he was well over twenty four.

Now, she's almost twenty four herself. Time's a funny thing.

"So you finally dumping that dude?" Giselle asks Karina.

I had a great time last night.

Would you have had a great time knowing why I was there in the first place?

"I," Karina rubs a hand down her face, smooths it over the scrubs she's still wearing. She's only in her second year of med school, so technically it's a little early for hospital shifts. She sighs. "It's complicated."

Giselle and Somi immediately get their faces to express well-practiced sympathy. She thinks it's unnecessary. They all know she's the only one out of the three who's ever liked Jeno enough to talk to him, let alone date him.

The reason she sighs is not because she's actually contemplating her relationship with Jeno - it's because she was supposed to be telling her friends all about their fake break-up, but Winter's bouquet messed everything up and she slipped and said the wrong thing.

According to their plan - Jeno's and hers - she actually doesn't have a boyfriend anymore. It makes sense. Perfect sense.

She had to go and complicate everything further.

"She's just a friend," Karina says, and it takes tremendous effort not to slap her own forehead as soon as the words are out of her mouth. This is not going according to plan at all.