[ @ethnsteele ]
It had been about two months now. Not that Hyunjin was counting, of course. He’d kind of lost track after the first month rolled by. But he typically met up with Ethan at least once a week, if not every other. Same day, same time, same place. Just to get coffee together before they had to go their separate ways to work. The breakup was pretty mutual; no hard feelings. But they had remained close friends since. And after Dahlia... Hyunjin could immediately see the change in Ethan. It worried him. She had tried to pull away from him. Lucky, or not so lucky, for her though, he was stubborn. Maybe it would have just been easier to let her pull away and he could have left it at that. But he didn’t want to.
No one at the coffee shop had seen her in weeks. She wasn’t answering calls or texts. She wasn’t home. And the last place that she worked to Hyunjin’s knowledge, claimed she quit. If he was going to give up, it seemed like this would be a pretty good time to do so. After a month, he stopped checking as frequently. But it was still a habit to swing by the same place at the same time they would have normally met up. Which was where Hyunjin found himself, taking up an entire booth to himself until he grew bored of messing around on his phone. He grabbed his coffee and headed out the door. On the bright side, he always showed up to work early on these days since their meetings were still programmed into his brain and with her being... wherever Ethan was, the time they would have normally spent chatting, he ended up getting to work that much earlier.
Except he swore he recognized her once he stepped outside. Hyunjin didn’t even give himself a moment to think, he just acted. Taking a bit larger of strides to catch up, he placed a gentle hand on the woman’s shoulder, hoping she would stop and turn around. Hoping it was her. “Ethan?”