Click, Click

Chapter 3

For the first time in a while, you were on your own. A few days had passed since the Instagram incident. Your account went viral for the attention and a ton of fans had followed you on the social media platform. There were rumors that you were dating Vernon, rumors that you and your friends had hacked their Instagram accounts to leave the comments, rumors that it hadn't actually been the boys.

But you weren't, and you hadn't, and it had been.

You had gotten a lot of comments on your posts. Even your old posts from middle school weren't safe. You were getting called a lot of things by a lot of people.

None of it really affected you. The nice comments, the mean ones, neither mattered. You didn't care what they had to say. They didn't know you. So how could they have any control over your feelings?

Yeah, wasn't that a mature way to approach the situation?

You sat down in the grass at a park you had stumbled upon while walking around. It was really pretty there. The sun was boring down on you, and it was relatively warm out. The upper eighties if you were measuring the temperature in Fahrenheit.

You should be sweating even when dressed in a pair of shorts and a tank top, especially since you had been sitting directly in the sun for the upper end of an hour. Even so, you weren't sweating. You weren't hot. You weren't even warm. You were cold.

You shivered.

While inside you had just assumed that you were under an air vent, or maybe the apartment you and your friends were sharing was just cold. You had moved outside hoping it would change how you felt, but no matter where you went, you felt cold.

You had looked like an idiot asking for hot chocolate in this blazing heat, and even that had done nothing for you.

"Maybe I'm sick," you murmured to yourself. Even as you said it you knew it wasn't true. While you felt cold like when you were sick, you could tell that you weren't. Your throat was fine, and while your eyes were heavy, it was probably just from getting used to sleeping at different times here in Korea. You got like this sometimes. When you had made some sort of mistake that you couldn't really keep up with. When your mental health was getting so low that you needed to just sit back and stop stressing.

How could you stop stressing though? How could you relax? How could you feel anything when everything felt like it was closing in on you? When everything felt so hopeless?

"You seem contemplative."

You didn't even jump. You slowly turned your head towards the voice. It was Jihoon again. At first you thought you were seeing things, but after you stared up at him for about a minute without saying a word you realized it really was him.

He was dressed in jeans, and a loose shirt that was a little big on him. He had a face mask over his mouth and a black ball cap on hiding his hair. You forced yourself to say something intelligent.

"Why are you doing this?" You asked. Jihoon sat down next to you. He didn't ask if he could, or if you wanted company. He just did.

"Doing what?"

"Talking to me."

Jihoon stared at you in a way that was scary. Not because he himself was scary, but because you weren't used to being looked at like that. He was committing you to his memory. You could tell by how intent his gaze was. Anything you did in this moment would be imprinted into his memory forever.

"Let's take a picture together," Jihoon said instead. "I'm your bias in Seventeen right? You should have a picture on your phone of you with your bias."