The black furry creature curls up in her arms, purring in contempt as her owner keeps on running her hand over her body even though her eyes are looking elsewhere.

Through the coiling metal of the gates, she tries to pretend as if she's only there to enjoy the afternoon sun while hugging her cat close to her chest and not look like she's on the watch for the gates of the house across. As soon as she spots what she's waiting for, she immediately releases the cat to the ground, waving her hands to ask the cat to go forward.

"Panther, go, go!" her mouth frantically says as she crouches, slowly pushing the cat's butt to guide her to where she should go. All the while, her eyes never leave the person who's coming through the front gates.

Panther looks back once to her owner before she squeezes through the opening between the gate and the wall, prancing and then breaking into full speed before jumping to the person who had just left the house for an evening jog. She then bumps into the legs of the person, where the latter instinctively crouches and picks the cat up.

"Panther, are you out for an evening jog too?" Yeosang lets the cat slither into his arms, slightly bowing as she hops onto his shoulder. "Do you want to be my jogging buddy?"

"Oh my god, I am so sorry!" The owner of the cat lets the automatic gate open, enough to squeeze her body through, before skittering towards Yeosang and holding her hands out. "I told her so many times to not wander around too much but she seems to take a much better liking to your house."

The cat makes a face to show her owner that she's been falsely accused and is currently feeling betrayed.

Yeosang chuckles. "She can come over whenever she likes," he says before looking at the cat's owner, who's fixing her glasses while looking slightly sheepish. "Are you done with today's work," he pauses as he tries to make eye contact with her, "Anna?"

She lowers down her eyes to the ground, feeling the blush creeping up on her whenever he says her name with his deep voice and she clasps her fingers before nodding. "I managed to finish two sketches of the clothes I was thinking of sewing, and I was thinking that maybe Soyeon wouldn't mind being my model again. I called her but she's not picking up her phone."

Yeosang's face changes, but he doesn't find it weird how Anna has completely no idea what had happened to Soyeon despite her already being missing a few days ago. Bae Wonshik wanted to keep everything on the low so of course even the neighbours who barely talk to each other wouldn't know, and even the fact that Soyeon didn't pick up the phone is not something alarming to her somewhat-friend Anna Yoo. Soyeon is known to ignore calls when she's too deep in painting something, becoming a slave to her paintbrushes and canvas until she forgets that she's still breathing, having to live a life to keep going.

"You... must not have heard about it then," he says. "I'm about to go for a jog but if you want to hear about it-"

"I can go jogging with you!" she quickly swoops in, looking ashamed that she sounded too eager. "I mean, if you don't mind having a jogging buddy."

He eyes her up and down before chuckling once more, "Are you really sure Panther ran to me on her own just as I was going out for a jog?"

The cat meows, defending herself.

He continues, "You look like you're ready to go for a jog yourself. Were you really just waiting for me-"

"I was not!" she huffs. "Why would I waste my time to wait for Soyeon's driver to go on an evening jog every two days?"

"That's pretty specific for someone who doesn't wait for me," Yeosang smiles, cradling Panther like a baby as the cat bends her legs and looks at both humans with round, yellow eyes.

The cat seems to sense something in between them as she looks from one person to the other, before she wriggles out of Yeosang's hold and makes her way to the Bae Mansion instead. Her butt swings from side to side as the humans watch on before she disappears inside the compound, the guards at the gates letting her walk past like she owns the house.

Yeosang turns to Anna. "So? Would you like to go for a jog with this person you totally weren't waiting for?" He smirks.

"Shut up," she grumbles before starting to jog first, leaving him trying to catch up with her while laughing lightly.

He likes to poke fun at her because he likes to see her reaction; she gets easily flustered and she's a super clumsy person who owns at least 10 cats. She's the daughter of medical professors who own several medically-related businesses, yet she's their second child and only daughter who refuses to follow their footsteps. Her brother has become a certified medical doctor, now on the road to become an oncologist. Meanwhile, Anna Yoo has been looking for a different path, despite having initially protesting parents, and has graduated with flying colours in fashion designing. Her love for sewing and designing has come to pay her back as she's currently working on to debut her own fashion line, this time having full support from her parents.

She always says, hard work always pays off, but sometimes I'm too tired to wait for the hard work to pay off.

Yeosang wouldn't say that her and Soyeon are friends; they are probably just acquaintances who know each other's names and phone numbers. They don't hang out together, they don't deliberately go out just to talk to each other; the only thing they have in common is probably their love for colours and art, and Anna has somehow convinced Soyeon to become the real-life mannequin to her designs. Soyeon didn't seem to mind, and Anna would only put a call through to her phone when she needs someone to try on her design prototype.

"What's up with Soyeon? Is she alright?" Anna opens up the topic, having been over her embarrassment at Yeosang trapping her with a question she refused to answer.

"She's..." he trails off, despite keeping up with her in a normal pace. He sounds like he's out of breath when in fact he's just thinking on whether he should reveal it to her and undo a rope around one particular Soyeon's secret that he has kept for some time. He halts, but she gets ahead in a few paces before stopping herself and falls down as she trips over her own foot. "Anna-"

Yeosang runs to her, crouching next to her before dutifully checking her palms and legs, as that's where she usually gets hurt the most whenever she falls over. He has lost count on how many times the girl would trip over her own feet, that his reaction is no longer a panicked one but an instinctive one as he takes out a box of plasters and rips it open. He sees that she acquired a cut on both palms for bracing the impact of her fall with them and he already has two pieces of plasters at the ready.

Anna stays quiet as he helps to cover up her wounds, merely shamelessly staring at him while he directs all his attention to her hands. He is mumbling something about telling her to always be careful and that she needs to keep a box of plasters at the ready whenever she goes out, but she's not listening. She's too busy admiring him, even though he's currently frowning and looking like he's about to scold her until next year. She just thinks he looks good even though his words are sharp, yet his hands are delicately covering up her cuts that she doesn't even realize he's done.

Only when his eyes shift to hers does she get startled before she promptly scoots away from him like he's about to scold her again for not paying attention.

"Are you listening to what I was saying?" he asks, dumping back the box of plasters inside his pocket. It's obvious that he knows Anna was going to wait for him that him bringing the box is compulsory, because she would hurt herself at least once whenever she's with him.

"Of course," she huffs, although no articulated words went through her ears, merely the beautiful melody that is his voice. "I may be clumsy but I'm not stupid."

"It doesn't have anything to do with being stupid," he says, softly hitting his knuckles against her temple. "I knew you weren't listening."

"I was," she defends herself again, praying to the skies that he won't be asking about what exactly was it that he talked about. She tries to stand up and he holds her wrist, as if asking her to help him get up too.

"Yeah, you were? Then what was I talking about?" He faces her, holding her stare as he towers over her. "Every single word I said."

"You told me not to get hurt again because I'm always a klutz," she randomly says, knowing that his nagging always revolves around the same thing whenever she falls. "Using that annoying voice of yours."

He bite his lower lip before turning around, getting ready to jog again. He doesn't answer her, only laughing internally because now he knows that she didn't hear whatever he just said to her. That's better, because that shit's embarrassing.

When she jogs alongside him, she crinkles her forehead as it seems that Yeosang is laughing at her; did she look stupid when she was ogling at him?

"Are you making fun of me?" she sounds slightly sulky, thinking that he's laughing at her.

"I'm not," he says. "You just look too cute I can't help it. But I thought it would be too sudden to say that when you just got hurt."

Upon hearing this she loses her balance again and dives headfirst against the pavement, too shocked to even function. Her crush just called her cute and she was not ready to hear it at all. She winces in pain as her wounds open up again, the plaster completely useless now that it's ripped. This time too her knees are exposed, the part of her pants ripped because the fall came harder. She only looks at her knees before sighing, a kneeling Yeosang coming into view, the usual routine coming through as his hand travels to his pocket again.

She stops him, shaking her head. "It's fine, you don't have to waste those plasters on me. I'll just go back home now since I can't jog anyway." In reality she's just too embarrassed, how she seems like she can't bring herself properly after Yeosang had complimented her.

She turns around, head down as she limps slightly and having no support. She doesn't look back, but she hates this feeling. Yeosang knows that she has the biggest crush on him, even resorting to using her cats as an excuse to bump into him. He always flirts with her in the subtlest ways, knowing that he's able to make her flustered even in the context of simply calling her cute, yet he doesn't go beyond that. It's frustrating her because it only seems like he's playing around with her, knowing how easy it is to make her act stupid.

For all she knows he could be doing this to other girls like this, yet she can't stop staring at that stupidly handsome face of his.

"I still haven't told you about Soyeon," Yeosang's voice comes up again next to her, with him looking at her worriedly as she continues on limping without any help. "And you need to get those wounds covered up."

"What's wrong with Soyeon? Did she get sick?" She tries as hard as she might to bring the topic away from her because she can't stand being played around by him, because he's looking like he's enjoying making her flustered.

He purses his lips, tilting his head to a nearby bench inside the neighbourhood. "You need to sit down if you want to hear what I have to say."

Without saying anything else she trudges over to the bench, and even though he wants to help her she brushes him away, saying that she can manage on her own. As she plops down, he takes one swift look at her knees to assess her injury before taking a seat next to her, sitting almost too close for her comfort. She scoots away, yet he remains at his original spot.

He doesn't bring the topic up about her wounds again, glancing as he thinks about how he would tell her. He had decided to keep his mouth shut until someone asks him about Soyeon; he wanted to respect her secret, but this time it's even bigger because it involved her bodyguards.

To him, Soyeon going missing is not something alarming.

"She's not at home," he says.

"Oh?" She blinks, not finding anything wrong with the statement. She has known Soyeon to be a homebody, but it wouldn't be weird for her to not be at home once it a while, would it? "Did she go somewhere?"

"It's not that..." he sighs. "Soyeon went missing."

She gets shocked that she almost looks like she's about to fall off the bench and hurt herself again, but he lightly touches her arm to which she shrugs off. "Bae Soyeon went missing and there are no news about it? The neighbourhood doesn't even know about it-"

"And that's why," he quickly interjects, "Sir Bae doesn't want anyone to know, so he's only instructing for a private search party. He didn't want the news to be sprawled all over about his daughter, not when the election is close."

She can't help but roll her eyes. "Of course, it was his idea to not let anything come loose. His daughter could have been kidnapped-"

"Anna," he stops her. "Listen. Soyeon goes missing all the time."

She looks at him slack-jawed. "What on earth is that supposed to mean?"

He releases a heavy breath. "You know how Soyeon really likes to spend her time alone that sometimes even the workers in her house don't know whether she's actually in the house or not? The house is simply too big and you can hide yourself anywhere. I'm the only person who spends most time with her, and even then it's when she doesn't shoo me away asking that she needs some privacy."

She tries hard to digest what he's saying. "So basically what you're trying to say is, even though Soyeon went missing, no one would notice?"

"Exactly, except for me. That's why I'm really the only person who'd notice that she's gone, because no one actually pays attention to her."

"So she's went missing before yet no one even noticed? Because you're the one who helped her escape."

"Technically, but-" He tries to rearrange his words. "Let's put it this way. She always goes missing, no one notices because I'm the one who helps to cover her up. I'm not worried because she always comes back a few days after; I don't even know where she goes. Not even her boyfriend knows that she does this secret rendezvous to wherever she goes once in a while, because Soyeon always picked out a time whenever Wooyoung is not around and won't come to her house. Like when he's on an overseas trip, or he's just too busy to come over."

"And you're enabling this... behaviour of her."

He sighs again, heavier. "It's because she's my best friend since we're little, but ever since her mother passed away she's been acting a little strange. Not a little, a lot. Even I, her best friend of 22 years, don't understand her behaviour. She keeps to herself too much, but when she's with Wooyoung she changes slightly. But that doesn't mean she completely opens up to him. It's like she has this layer around her that's protecting her from other people. Then some time after her mother passed away she asked some help from me; she said she wanted to 'escape' to somewhere for a few days and doesn't want to be contacted. So I thought that maybe, okay she needs a break from all of this. I never know where she goes; she always asks me to drop her at this particular place, then the next thing I know is that she's gone. But then she would show up again at the house, almost making me jump out of my skin. I thought it would only be a one time thing but she's been doing this a lot for several years now. She never got hurt, so I didn't want to disturb her privacy too much. As long as she's safe, then I'm fine with it."

"But what's different this time?"

"Sir Bae hired some personal bodyguards for her, but I don't think you would've noticed them. They don't go out the usual road."

She shrugs, it's true that she doesn't keep track even though their houses are only across each other. They have their own problems to worry about that the number and faces of workers don't concern them; plus workers come and go all the time.

"The fact that she went missing only came to light because her bodyguards were there; of course they'd report it straight away." He leans back against the bench, staring as the sun starts to set. There are some who are just returning from work, or some going out to have dinner. "I don't know; this time it just seemed different. Also... her house was broken into just a few days before she went missing."

"Really? By Reflectors?" she instinctively asks, because that name has become a household name, where people in neighbourhoods like theirs fear.

"Most likely," he nods. "But we didn't catch them nor did we report anything. She said she could have been paranoid because she was just tired."

"But since you said she goes missing once in a while... wouldn't you think that she'd come back like she always does?"

"You could say that, but that's not what's making me worried. When she goes 'missing' before, she'd always bring her phone with her, despite switching it off to avoid from people tracking her down. But this time around she left her phone at home, and that's not only the case. Every data in her phone have been wiped off, like it's a brand new phone. It's like she's telling everyone that she's not planning to come back."