"You’re a cherry blossom, you’re about to bloom, you look so pretty but you’re gone so soon." —-
The door swings shut behind her with a resounding click. Jinah stares straight ahead unseeingly into the dimness as the pad of her thumb grazes the jagged cut of the key gripped tightly in her fist, a faint shadow of a smile ghosting over her lips. Your lock remains unchanged even after all this time, huh? One might even dare to think you were waiting for me or something. And even as the voices in her head screech in protest, her feet is already taking her to where she wants to go, feathery steps readily tracing back the familiar path she used to take nearly everyday into his bedroom. She enters hesitantly and exhales. Oh, the memories. They cut her like little tiny knives. His hair is in knots against his pillow, a curly haven of dissonance, and yet he still manages to entice. The fading, effervescent light of the ocher dawn seems to bleed into the man’s ebony hair, dying his locks a warm orange color. Bags line his eyes, a likely product of the stress accumulated during his shifts, but that does not stop Jinah from stepping closer to him, entranced like a mere child enchanted by a spell. She remembers once, amidst raucous laughs and stolen candies from her childhood that her brother had once told her, “Beautiful things should belong to beautiful souls." Jongin had said it with such intensity that it made goosebumps rise all over her flesh. Anticipation blooms at her fingertips as she reaches out towards him. Is she daring enough? And yet, perhaps she is, Jinah agrees silently to herself as she sits on his left, the bed dipping slightly under her weight as she does so. Her soft, tiny hands blindly seek his automatically, her fingertips mapping out each and every line of his palm as she studies his eyelids - thin, translucent skin with purple pale veins bubbling underneath. For a fleeting moment she wishes that she had caught him awake - Jinah misses his intricate gaze. His eyes were darker than spilt ink and the midnight sky put together, and they were what she loved the most about him. She murmurs his name like a prayer that she had forgotten long ago, and pauses to press her lips against his cheek, gifting him with a kiss that conveys what her eyes and the curve of her mouth don’t. Jinah wasn’t sure when she could visit him again. Will your lock have been changed by then, Woobin-ah? And then all too soon she was gone again, leaving behind only the faintest traces of her perfume, rumpled bedsheets and a smudged scarlet blossom on his pale skin.














