say something |changki/kikyun|

•6•

The summer ended faster than we had thought. One night, we fell asleep to our window wide open, and the next morning we woke up freezing cold, Kihyun's lips a touch of blue. We changed our bed sheets to thicker ones, while throwing our pillows at each other. I didn't yet wear my winter uniform as it was still the middle of October, but I became used to carrying a sweater with me when I went to class - a sweater I ended up giving to Kihyun after school anyways. While I was clumsy, he forgot the little things.

In just the span of a few weeks we had gotten used to each other. Kihyun always walked down the stairs next to me because I tended to trip over a step. He was a very light sleeper, and whenever I woke up in the middle of the night to go to the toilet, he turned on the flashlight of his phone so I wouldn't fall over anything. I made it my task to always pack two sweaters. When Kihyun fell asleep after we had watched a drama while he was still reading something on his phone, I laid it on his nightstand and tucked him in his blanket so he wouldn't be cold when he woke up because our room resembled the Antarktis these days.

Strangely enough, whenever my fingers were dragging the blanket over his body and stopped right below his chin, I caught myself letting them stay there for a second, looking at Kihyun sleeping. He looked like an angel, his hair cuddled and his lashes slightly fluttering. One time, I had even thought about just laying down next to him. I mean, it's what we were doing while watching dramas anyways, right?

But it never seemed to be the right idea. I always released my fingers from the blanket and lied down in my own bed, turning my body so I was facing him.

I also lend him pencils, because he always forgot his pencilcase. He drew little doodles and wrote down song lyrics, but he never hid them. I tried skimming through sign language dictionaries on the Internet, but soon discovered that sign language wasn't very commonly used in Korea. There were almost no sources and no way to find out what he had really said to me that day in the bathroom when his fingers had been dancing in front of his eyes.

I had created different scenarios in my mind on what he had wanted to convey. I never really knew what I wished he had said. There was only scenario that got my heart racing and I didn't know why. I had searched for every sign that meant "you", hoping one would resemble the strange sign he had made that looked like he was shielding his eyes, until I had thrown my phone on my matress and buried my face in my pillow.

The next morning, I was lying in bed ill with a cold - inevitable, considering the heaters still weren't on. At least I didn't have a fever.  I tried to keep quiet when we were getting ready for school, but just a few seconds later a coughing fit shook my body, making my lungs burn. Kihyun insisted I stayed at home that Friday, even though I had a test. To be honest, I felt so horrible I didn't have anything against his decision.

He went to the convenience store and bought some soup and tea to keep me warm. He made a living burrito out of me with approximately a hundred blankets until I was sweating buckets. When I refused to take pills because I hated the feeling in my throat, he glared at me until I gave up. He could achieve everything with just a glance - I even tried to stop him from climbing in the bed next to me, trying to shove him away so he wouldn't become sick, too, although that's exactly where I wanted him to be. But in the end, we ended up where we always did - shoulder to shoulder. It was a better cure for my cold than any medicine.

It was a bit of time later, when I had already fully recovered, that it was Jooheon who brought a touch of light into the darkness.

"Hey, can I ask you something?", he said on Friday, one week before the autumn holidays. I was leaning over my plate of food, eating the chicken with my hands because I was too hungry to torture myself with cutlery.