"It's gonna take a while, come in." Sera sniffed as she somehow ushered her groggy voice after a momentarily long period of silence, to which Gaeul responded with an accusatory hum. Sera clicked her tongue anticipating an endless scolding being aimed at her, but the other female was not so transparent as she had always been mistaken as.

"You better not hold it back anymore. You've been averting me, probably due to this very matter, for quite long now." Gaeul side-eyed Sera, who had by then cleared up her couch for the same woman to seat.

Gesturing her rather unnoticeably by a nod of her head, Sera must have expected her to follow her lead of settling down on the sofa, which Gaeul had wasted no time in figuring out.

"I'm dating Jimin." Sera blurted out in a single breath, seeming no less than sputtering jumbled words which Gaeul was supposedly left in-charge of arranging sequentially on her own.

"W—what did you say?" Gaeul's simple-mindedness was doubted a while ago, but it was about time the claim was re-analyzed.

The woman's face displayed explicit pandemonium that her brain had now become, even leading her to wonder if Sera even spoke something in the first place or it was just her going ahead of herself once again.

"I said, I'm dating Jimin." Sera repeated herself, but this time with adequate emphasis on each word. She gasped dramatically at Gaeul who still retained the same confusion in her features, though it was also reducing with time undoubtedly.

"Yeah, so what? I mean, that was what I had assumed too after listening to him being so stressed about you and al—"

"BTS' Jimin. The idol, Park Jimin." Sera interjected with an exceptionally serious undertone.

Gaeul did not know anymore what to act surprised at, the fact that her close friend was dating a celebrity, or how Sera's moods were switching like anything.

"You must be kidding me..." Gaeul's voice faltered out of uncertainty, which she succeeded in concealing with an awkward chortle, but still could not make it appear less obvious.

"Search him up and you'll know." Sera stated with a straight face, effortlessly compelling Gaeul to believe in her words.

Gaeul's memory of her scrolling through random news whilst taking a break from preparing her study material for the next day's class flashed across her eyes unannounced, and she could not restrain herself from being convinced that Sera had indeed been telling her the truth.

"But ho— Are you two perhaps seeing each other from the past two years? If that turns out to be true then I swear nothing will be able to budge me from labeling my life as a complete joke." Gaeul's voice decreased yet again towards the end, causing Sera to giggle at her utterly hopeless friend. When Gaeul looked up at her with a brow raised in puzzlement, Sera was at once stirred to sort her presumption.

"That was when we had first met, yes, but we didn't become close back then. Don't you remember how absurdly I had behaved for a whole month? Would that have been possible if I were seeing Jimin? I mean, we don't know about that either— Anyway, we happened to bump into each other once again around two months back, and we, in a way, ended up like this." Sera would have been all perked up had what occurred earlier in the evening not taken place at all.

She found herself on a bittersweet footing, with the aftertaste so ephemeral that it would end up dissipating into thin air as soon as she was done recalling.

Numb was what she would call herself right now.

"What went wrong all of a sudden, then?" Gaeul's brows joined one another in sheer worry, prompting her to reach out for Sera's trembling hand.

"It's in the news. People are disliking him for a choice that he made. How sad is that... can't you see, Gaeul? I did feel hurt too, I'll be honest. But that doesn't matter when because of me he's at the risk of losing a portion of love that he has worked so hard for, for all these years. I'm not that selfish, I can never be." Sera shuddered as a choked sob got in the way of her speech, making her fail at keeping control over herself.

"If that's the case... then why didn't you tell him? Don't you think he deserves to know why you called off your date so suddenly? Could th—that be possible...Don't tell me you dragged my name in between once agai—"

"I did. I had no other choice, Gaeul! Do you really think it'd have been better if I had told him we can't be together because his fans don't approve of it? Do you really think he'd have taken the issue seriously then?" Sera's temper was rising, and Gaeul could not reckon a single way to douse the former's anger before it leapt beyond the threshold. Afterall, it was her who had hit Sera's vulnerable spot, she possibly could not have come up with a solution so soon too.

"It would be easier for him to forget me if he thought of me as an opportunist who was there for him just because of his status. It's harder when you see someone you love, leaving you just like that when the love between you still hadn't died. All I want for him is not to get hurt, I don't care about myself. I'll get better with time, I know that in my heart." Gaeul rushed towards Sera as soon as the latter had concluded, in the probable fear of her falling apart literally any minute now.

And then she cried in Gaeul's arms, as foreseen. Gaeul kept on rubbing her back consolingly and telling her that better days were awaiting both her and Jimin, and that this was not the end for them. But none of her comforting words had an impact on Sera. Gaeul had unknowingly opened up the female's fresh wounds, with the agony that they were causing, growing unbearable with time.