together [daejae]

Chapter 16

It took a few minutes until Daehyun had calmed down enough to speak. We were lying on his bed, on our backs next to each other. The back of my hand was lightly touching his.

"I don't know where to start..." he took a deep breath. His voice was shaking heavily. "It's all just... too much..."

I took his hand and scooted a bit closer towards him. "Just start with whatever comes to your mind first."

He nodded and I could feel him squeeze my hand a little bit.

"I think I should say that I... I didn't push him or anything. I didn't make him fall out that window."

"But didn't you say you did it?"

He shook his head and wiped the tears off of his cheeks. "I said it was my fault."

"How?"

"I could have stopped him..." He sighed and closed his eyes. "When I came here... I was put into a room with Max. He was already living here and was friends with Yongguk and the others. I did not really meet them a lot because I felt too sad about being taken here to do something with people. I just wanted to go back to you... the only person I ever really talked to was Max. We became friends after a while... I always felt like Yongguk didn't like it when he hung out with me instead of them." he paused, probably sorting his thoughts.

"A few weeks after I came, my parents visited me. We were in the hall with everyone else and I expected them to bring you but... You know that story. Anyways... after that, I barely even left the room anymore, so whenever Max was there, I was there too. We got really close really soon. He was the only one I told about you. After a while, he... Started behaving differently. He became more and more touchy and dropped meetings with his friends for being with me more and more often. I knew he had a crush on me, he wasn't trying to hide it at all. But I didn't have the courage to tell him that I didn't feel the same, because I still hadn't coped with losing you and I... He had some pretty bad mental health issues, so I was scared of making him feel bad... I felt so stressed out by this that I kind of distanced myself from him. I just didn't know how to act around him anymore, I liked him, but just as a close friend..."

I noticed he was crying harder again. Now, the bad part was probably coming. I rolled over and wrapped my other arm around him, my hand still holding his.

"One day... I went to our room after breakfast and found a letter on my bed. I took it and put it in my pocket, I thought... I thought he would write about his feelings for me... and I was too scared of this because then I would have had to talk to him about this... I totally forgot about the letter throughout the rest of the day. In the afternoon I came back from a walk and... when I opened the door to our room I saw him sit in the open window... he did that sometimes so I didn't really think anything of it, and I was about to ask what he's doing but before I could say anything he just..." Daehyun stopped speaking.

I understood and the feeling I got from this was one of the most horrible feelings I had ever had. I only noticed now that I had started to cry as well. I didn't even know what to say to him right now. "I'm so sorry.." I whispered and hugged him a little tighter. "Are you sure he didn't just fall?"

He shook his head. "I saw he did it on purpose. And... Later, after everything had... Calmed down on that day... I read his letter and...he said he liked me, that I was someone very special to him and I was the only person he could tell the following things... Then he wrote about how he wanted to die... How he felt like everything was just pointless and he did not feel anything anymore and he didn't want to live a life when he was just feeling numb... and he had lost all hope it would ever get better again... so he chose this way to get out..." He sobbed. "If I had just read it right when I found it... I could have stopped him..."

There was just silence for a few minutes. We were both crying, and I had to admit I had not felt this close to him in forever. It felt like he had let his barriers down and finally let me look into his soul.

"So this is why you feel responsible for what happened to him?" I asked carefully.

"Yeah... I was the one he spent the most time with, I should have looked after him better... I should have stopped him..."

"But why does Yongguk say that you pushed him?"

"Yongguk doesn't know the whole truth. He talked to me afterwards and... I just couldn't tell him the details, it was too much for me to even think about all this, so I... I just told him it was my fault. He never really liked me anyway, so that turned into the version of me pushing him really quickly. You know how gossip works. Yongguk was just so done after our talk, I think if he hadn't been so paralysed by everything in that moment, he'd have hit me right then. I knew he'd tell everyone, but... I felt like I deserved it. Even if I didn't do exactly what they thought, I still felt responsible so it didnt really matter that they didn't know the truth."

"So he doesn't know about the letter either? He really thinks you just killed him?"

"I think so, yes. At the end of the letter... Max asked me not to show this to anyone, under no circumstances. In the beginning, I thought since Yongguk was his best friend, he'd have gotten a letter too, but... I think if he had one, he wouldn't have told everyone the wrong story."