Jingi blinked for a few seconds before finally answering.
“…Yeah, yeah. I’m fine.”
“Did you get a big scare?”
Joo Unyoung helped Jingi up while still holding him. Jingi followed the movement blankly, his mind trailing a second behind the sensation of being patted on the shoulder. Then, Baek Jaehui, who had set the chair back up, barked and pulled them apart.
“Hey! What are you two guys doing? That’s gross, seriously!”
“Hey, man… it’s because you startled me.”
“Who told you to be such a scaredy-cat?”
“Did you contribute to my being a scaredy-cat?”
“You want me to contribute? I’ll take care of Jingi’s ‘scaredy-heart’ like ‘this’! Huh? Like ‘this’!”
As they bickered, Baek Jaehui huffed and reached his hands into the air, miming a kneading motion. At the suggestive movement, Jaehui’s friends cackled until one of them slammed his head into the wall. He screamed “Ow!” and whined for a long time about why nobody was supporting or comforting him.
Meanwhile, Joo Unyoung continued to check on Jingi, seating him back down and asking again, “Are you okay?” Since he wasn’t hurt anywhere, Jingi just nodded.
“Yeah… I’m fine. Just startled.”
“Baek Jaehui, you stop that too. You’re being disgusting.”
“Shit. Fine, fine! I’m ‘so’ sorry! Happy now?”
The air-kneading Baek Jaehui scowled. ‘Was it really that bad to look at…?’ No, wait. Baek Jaehui was a Sub-Male Lead too. Jingi realized his opening and let a smirk crawl onto his face. Time for Plan B. If things didn’t work out with Go Yeol, Baek Jaehui was next.
“Are you jealous?”
“What?”
“You’re jealous because Unyoung hugged me, aren’t you?”
100%. Guaranteed. There was no other reason for him to be throwing such a fit with a face that red.
Seeing Baek Jaehui turn as red as someone who’d never been in a relationship, Jingi couldn’t hold back his laughter anymore and doubled over. These eighteen-year-old kids were cute and ticklish to watch.
“Hey! Why would I be jealous of that? Are you crazy? Are you?”
“Then what is it if not jealousy? Why get so worked up over him helping me when I fell?”
“No, it’s not that!”
“Unyoung, give him a hug too. Otherwise, he’s gonna cry.”
“Argh!”
Eventually, Baek Jaehui practically ran out of the classroom. Seeing the tips of his ears turned red, it seemed Jingi had hit the bullseye. After that, his friends went back to their own seats, chatting among themselves. The surroundings suddenly became quiet. Grinning with satisfaction, Jingi started gathering his textbooks for the next period.
‘I should stop sitting in Yeol’s seat.’
As he pulled out his metal pencil case to pick a pen, he felt a gaze from his right.
“What?”
Joo Unyoung was staring at him intently. Jingi asked if he had something to say, but there was no answer. Unyoung stared blankly with his eyes lowered before suddenly snapping his head up.
“Hmm?”
“You have something to say? You were looking at me.”
“Ah… no, nothing.”
“Really?”
Unconsciously, Jingi moved his gaze to where Joo Unyoung had been looking. It was just his school uniform shirt. He patted his chest area to see if something was on it, but the white shirt was clean.
Joo Unyoung’s cheeks were somehow tinged with a rosy hue. Thinking he might be a little hot, Jingi carefully drew the curtains against the sunlight and sat back down.
Why is Unyoung’s heart racing so much? He’s acting as if he’s the one I called pretty… well, he ‘is’ pretty. Actually, he’s the prettiest one here. I should probably tell him that later to cheer him up before the trip.
Jingi couldn’t study at all during tonight’s self-study session. As he left the study hall, guilt rose up to his throat, but there was something more urgent than studying.
He opened his notebook and tried to remember what Kim Hyeyeon had said while she was drinking heavily. Since he had been a heavy drinker himself back then and was quite drunk, it was incredibly frustrating that his memories were patchy.
First, there was the villain, Ju Hyeon-jae, who committed kidnapping, threats, and even robbery. The words Jingi had said after reading the novel bothered him the most.
“I think it would be better if the villain was a bit more evil.”
In the future, he thought it would be better to consider the human rights of novel characters. Did Kim Hyeyeon actually edit the story after hearing that? He didn’t know how it had been changed, so it was difficult to prepare for this part.
And next.
“I… actually, right? I had, like, so much to write for the side stories. ‘Hic’… Damn it! There are, like, so many hidden episodes! One is, uh, haha… I was prepared to get cursed at for this one, and the other involves a double-cross after a double-cross, you know? But how was I supposed to know it would fail like this! After it became a hit, I was going to… people would be like, ‘Is this author crazy?’… I thought of something like that…”
He couldn’t remember exactly, but it was something like that. It was just like Kim Hyeyeon, who always had the label “attention seeker” following her around.
However, even after thinking about it all through the self-study session, there was no way to know what kind of episode she had hidden or how she planned to shock the readers.
The memory of her telling him what kind of episode it was had completely vanished. If it was an episode she expected to be cursed for, was she planning to write a side story where they break up? Or was it actually a “It was all a dream” ending?
“You know we’re meeting at the library tomorrow morning, right?”
“Morning?”
Lost in thought, Jingi snapped his head up at the mention of morning. Joo Unyoung, who had studied for three hours without a break, was still smiling with sparkling eyes.
“Yeah. Morning.”
Morning? How early? You didn’t say anything about the morning…
Jingi sighed as he trudged out of the school building. He liked solving problems, but he hated studying; he didn’t mind going to the library, but he hated waking up early.
Fortunately, his body seemed to be that of a morning person as he woke up at dawn every day, but lately, that time was being pushed back. As if his body and soul were syncing up, Jingi had recently been closing his eyes and sleeping for another 30 minutes after waking up at dawn.
“What time…?”
“8:00.”
“Got it…”
He sighed loudly on purpose, but Joo Unyoung didn’t push the time back. Jingi internally criticized Joo Unyoung for being more clueless than he thought.
The two walked toward the gym. Just then, a “hedgehog” whose hair looked slightly damp as if he had just finished showering walked out slowly. Go Yeol looked exactly like a protagonist who had jumped out of a sports manga.
