Shin could tell you had stopped liking him. He could tell when he noticed your friends laughing, he didn’t know how, but he knew in his soul they were making fun of him. The way you faintly chuckled at whatever they said proved to him he didn’t mean as much to you as he thought he did.

He had always suspected that he liked you more than you liked him; the way you would disappear in the morning before he woke up after sleeping with him, the way you constantly cancelled plans on anything that wasn’t you and him having sex, or the way he saw you flirting with other guys. The only reason he stayed around was because there was once a time—before you decided you stopped valuing his place in your life—that he actually connected with you, bonding over the shared unhappiness and uncertainty of your places in your lives, Shin didn’t want to let go of that. But now he felt like he was holding onto something that was ceasing to exist.

Your friends had never liked him, and to be fair, he never liked your friends. A bunch of druggies and alcoholics who wouldn’t amount to much in life, and Shin believed you were better than them, yet his hope was starting to fade as you slowly became a little more influenced by their ways as the days went on.

You had started to drunk text him more, not about anything important, like he’d prefer, but just incoherent nonsense. It wore him down slowly realizing how little you had started to care about him, really only using him when you needed someone to tell you everything was gonna be okay. He hadn’t minded the first few times, but it was when you only started seeing him when it was convenient for you that it started to feel you were using him for some sense of emotional reassurance.

Even so, Shin didn’t really want to cut you out of his life. Something about how you used to be kept him tethered to you in hopes things would go back to normal. It was because he was so attached to you that he didn’t say anything against your friends, he just took whatever jabs or passive aggressive comments they made because he didn’t want to ruin what gave you some semblance of happiness. He just wished he could be enough for you so that you didn’t have to resort to your lame-ass friends for a distraction from how miserable you felt. But he wasn’t that for you, he didn’t know how to be. So he was compliant, letting your friends bad mouth him as much as it sucked. As long as you didn’t choose to leave him, he could take it.

Tonight was really no different. You had agreed to come over to his apartment to hang out, but it wasn’t as nice as Shin was hoping it would be. He didn’t know what he was expecting, but it didn’t feel good when you didn’t seem interested in anything he had to say.

Was he boring you? Because you seemed to be looking at your phone like it was gonna ring.

“I think you need new friends.”

He said out of nowhere, not anything mature, but it was something that would grab your attention, something to talk about that might lead somewhere.