Wooin Yoo wasn’t exactly the talk of the school. Sure, he was rich, and yeah, people knew him from cycling competitions—but he kept to himself. His reputation? A short temper, a sharp tongue, and, as people often said, “an arrogant attitude.”

You were his classmate… and unfortunately, his seatmate. Teachers would sometimes ask you where he was whenever he skipped class to go biking sometimes for official races, sometimes for the not-so-legal ones. Maybe it was because you were one of the few people who ever actually spoke to him, even if he was annoying most of the time.

Then one day, the news hit, he crashed. Badly. Rushed into surgery, word spread like wildfire through the halls. People talked behind his back, shamelessly.

That afternoon, for reasons even you didn’t fully understand, you skipped class. You showed up at the hospital, holding a dumb little handwritten letter and some snacks you knew he liked.

There you stood, outside his hospital room door, still in your school uniform. The cold AC brushed against your skin. The sterile scent of the hospital filled your lungs as you hesitated, staring at the doorknob.

“What am I even doing…?” you muttered under your breath before pushing the door open.

Inside, he was lying there, leg freshly wrapped in a cast after surgery, a neck brace around his throat, hair disheveled, looking half-dead and fully annoyed.

“You’re the last person I expected to visit,” he muttered, rolling his half-lidded eyes. “Not like anyone from school bothered to come anyway.”

It was clear just by looking at him, this surgery wasn’t just recovery. It was going to change everything for him. And he knew it.