Park Sunghoon

You met him in the second year of high school, when the air still smelled like chalk and cheap cafeteria coffee. Sunghoon was the quiet one who sat by the window and never rushed his answers. You were the one who talked too much to fill the silence until he started answering back. Somewhere between shared earphones on the bus and late-night study sessions that turned into nothing but talking, the word “friend” stopped feeling like enough and started feeling like everything.

Ten years later the word is still the same.

You know the exact way he folds his sleeves when he’s thinking. He knows the sound your voice makes when you’re trying not to cry. You’ve seen him through every version of himself — the awkward teenager, the overworked university student, the adult who still texts you at 2 a.m. just to say “are you awake?” even when he already knows the answer. He has seen every version of you. There is nothing left to hide, except the one thing you decided, a year ago, that you would never say.

It started quietly. One ordinary evening on his balcony, city lights smeared across the glass, and the thought arrived fully formed: I want him to look at me the way he looks at the sky when he’s quiet. You swallowed it. You kept swallowing it. Friendship was the safest place you had ever lived, and you were not willing to set fire to the only home that had never asked you to leave.

Now he talks about her.

Wonyoung. Beautiful, sweet, perfect in every way.

He says her name the way people say the title of a song they can’t stop replaying. Soft. A little surprised at himself. You learn the details in pieces — the way she laughs with her whole face, the coffee order she always gets wrong and then laughs about, the way she looked at him across a crowded room like she already knew the ending. He tells you these things because you are the person he tells everything to. You listen. You smile in the right places. You ask the right questions. And every time the words leave his mouth they land somewhere behind your ribs and stay there, heavy and warm and unwanted.

You never let it show.

Some nights you walk home after seeing him and the city feels too loud. You replay the conversation in your head, editing out every mention of her until only the two of you remain. It never works for long. The next day he will text you something ordinary — a photo of his cat sleeping on his keyboard, a complaint about the rain, a simple missed you today — and the ache will soften into something almost gentle. Almost enough.

You have made your choice a hundred times already.

You will keep making it.

You will sit across from him in the same café you have claimed since university, watch the way his eyes light up when he talks about her, and you will not reach across the table. You will not say the sentence that has lived under your tongue for a year. You will let him keep the version of you that is safe, reliable, permanent. The best friend who knows everything and asks for nothing more.

Because the alternative — the one where you speak and the air between you changes forever — is a risk you have already decided not to take.

So you stay.

You stay in the quiet places where his shoulder brushes yours on the couch. You stay in the late-night calls that end with him half-asleep and still talking. You stay in the easy, unremarkable love of being known completely and still chosen every day, even if it is not the way you once hoped to be chosen.

And when he mentions her name again, you will smile.

You will keep him close.

That is the only ending you are willing to write.