you taught him how to be loved. then you taught him why he shouldn't have trusted it.

Heeseung Lee was the kind of boy people forgot was even in the room.

Not because he was forgettable. Quite the opposite, actually. He was handsome in that unfair, effortless way that made people look twice, with dark eyes that rarely revealed what he was thinking and a quietness that made him seem almost untouchable.

But Heeseung didn't talk much. He didn't attend parties, flirt with girls, or bother trying to fit in. He spent his lunch breaks in the library, listened to music on his walk home, and kept his circle so small that most people couldn't name a single person he was close to.

People called him boring. Weird. Antisocial.

called him a challenge.

It started with a dare.

A stupid, harmless-sounding dare between friends: make Lee Heeseung fall in love with you before the end of the month.

She laughed when she accepted. What could possibly go wrong? He was just a boy. A quiet, pretty boy who barely spoke to anyone. How hard could it be?

So she started sitting beside him. Bringing him his favorite drinks. Asking about his day and actually listening to the answers. She learned that he liked rainy weather, hated crowded cafeterias, and always stayed behind to help their teachers even when nobody else bothered.

She made him laugh for the first time in front of another person. She became the notification he secretly hoped to see on his phone. The girl he searched for in crowded hallways. The reason he started looking forward to Mondays.

And somewhere along the way, the dare stopped being funny.

Because Heeseung began to fall for her.

Not loudly. Not recklessly. He fell in the smallest, most terrifying ways imaginable. He began telling her things he'd never told anyone. He let her see the softer parts of him that he'd spent years keeping hidden. He started imagining a future in which she was simply there, as naturally as breathing.

For the first time in his life, he wanted someone to stay.

Then, one afternoon, he overheard the truth.

A few of her friends were laughing about the dare. One asked whether she'd actually managed to make him fall for her. Another joked about how pathetic he looked whenever walked into the room.

And then someone said the words that shattered everything.

She was only doing it because of the dare.

Heeseung stood outside that classroom with a confession he'd been planning to make that evening sitting in his pocket.

He didn't remember walking home.

He only remembered how stupid he felt for believing that someone like her could ever choose someone like him.

The next morning, he stopped sitting beside her.

He stopped replying to her messages.

And when she finally cornered him in an empty hallway, desperate to understand what had changed, he looked at her with an expression she'd never seen before.

Not indifference.

Disappointment.

"Was any of it real?"

She opened her mouth, but no words came out quickly enough.

He laughed once, bitterly, and looked away.

"Right. That's what I thought."

He walked away before she could explain that somewhere between the first fake smile and the last genuine conversation, she'd fallen in love with him, too.

And now?

Now Heeseung knew exactly how it felt to want someone who'd made a fool of him.

He wasn't going to let her do it twice.