My first love was sweet when it started, but near the middle, it was bitter. Horribly so.

When I first met Yang Jungwon, I was barely ten years old. He was the one who started our friendship by granting my only real birthday wish.

It was a sunny day—a brutally hot day, actually. The sun beat down on the people like a relentless wave of fire, letting up only when the occasional cloud passed below it, and only the light filtered through. If the sun was fire on a stove, then the roads were a pan. A frying pan, and we were the people in it, slowly getting burned.

My skin had already turned a light shade red from the time I had already at the skating park in my neighborhood, desperately trying to learn how to stay balanced on my roller skates, a precious gift from my parents for my birthday a week before. My mother kept calling out to me, saying, "let's go home, you'll get sunburned if you don't!"

But I was stubborn. I was as relentless as the sun. At age ten, I definitely understood the dangers of being sunburned, and yet, I didn't care very much that every part of my skin that was exposed by the light summer dress decorated with pictures of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves burned and stung. I wasn't even wearing a hat or sunglasses.

All that I cared about was that I learned to skate, or at least stay balanced, not fall down and hurt myself or overshoot and end up crashing into some barrier while doing it, but I was failing. My knees were already scraped up from falling down—I didn't have knee guards, and my parents couldn't afford anything else but the roller skates itself and the helmet I wore on my head, the only thing keeping the top of my head mildly cool. With the helmet on, it did feel a little too warm, though not nearly as much as my bare skin.

I had a long list of birthday wishes, though even at nine years old, I understood that my parents did not have the means to grant me those things. But when my father surprised me with the roller skates, I knew one thing. Learning to use them was my only real, the only serious birthday wish that I had.

My mother could have helped me, but she sat in the shade about fifty meters away on a bench under a tree as she was sick—she was almost always sick or tired because she worked so hard.

So it was just me by myself, with a few other older kids skating around effortlessly with their friends, protected by the long-sleeved, loose clothes they wore and the safety gear I could never afford. Some of them gave me strange looks, a little kid struggling to even keep her balance, but I paid them no mind.

That is, until I fell over for the fifteenth time, and this time, I caught my fall with my hands, and the skin scraped off. The ground was rough and hot and I had hit it with all my weight. I cried out and sat up, fighting back tears when I heard a few snickers. How dumb must I have looked? How idiotic did I seem?

"You're going to hurt yourself that way," a voice said critically. "And I mean that you'll hurt yourself worse than that if you don't get help. You're kind of hopeless right now."

I looked up into the face of a boy. My first impression was that he was older than me, and then I took in his face, and thought that he might be younger than me. Then I saw the book in his hand. It was a textbook I studied with myself at school and came to the conclusion that he was the same age as I was.

"Excuse me?" I asked, pushing myself to my feet—or tried to, and failed miserably. I'd never tried to stand up with my skates in the position that I was in before that, so it was no surprise that I fell right back down. My already-red face reddened further in absolute, complete humiliation.

The boy sighed and reached down. For a moment, panic seized me, thinking something along the lines of, he's going to hurt me. I had never really been a good student in school, and got into plenty of fights. My teachers didn't know what to do with me anymore—and as for my parents, they simply threw their hands up in despair.

He didn't hurt me, though. With a surprising gentleness that didn't match his annoyed expression, he grabbed my wrist and hauled me to my feet, taking my other wrist when I stumbled. "Stay here," he ordered when I was steady on my feet at last. I frowned at him, not understanding what he was trying to do, when he ran off towards the crowd of parents not far from where my mother was, sitting on a low, raised platform under a large tarp supported by thick, sturdy poles.

He tugged on the sleeve of a man and spoke rapidly. Though the man looked confused, he pulled a square of cloth out of his pocket and handed it to the boy, who turned and took the bottle of cold water standing by the man's feet. He then turned back and ran to me, not saying a word as he unscrewed the cap and took my hands.

I watched quietly in confusion and a little fascination as he poured a little of the water of my hands, poking at them gently with one finger—as if he were afraid to touch me anymore—to wash away the sand and dirt. He looked up at me once, his expression an annoyed one no more. He looked hesitant and maybe a little sheepish.

"What?" I asked. "Carry on. You're the boss, aren't you, since I'm kind of hopeless?"

His eyebrows lifted and his mouth quirked. "I guess I am," he replied.

He turned his attention back to his task, pouring water over my hands in larger gushes, his brow furrowing in concentration as he washed away the blood that welled up from the cuts. Thankfully, they were shallow and my hands were mostly numb but not blood-covered when he ran out of water and stuck the bottle under his arm with his book.

I blinked when I realized that he had been doing this with his book and the handkerchief under his arm, both of them pressed against his ribcage. He used the handkerchief to dry my hands and looked at me. "There. All better," he said with the barest of smiles.

"Um. Thank you?" I managed, shaking my hands to try to get the feeling back in them. "I have no idea why you did that, but yes. Thank you."

"Like I said, you're hopeless," he tilted his head at me, as if daring me to challenge his reasoning. "Watching you flail around is just painful."

"Then why don't you help me?" I said coolly, daring him to accept. "It will lessen the pain, no?"

"Challenge accepted," he shrugged, holding a hand out to me. "Come on, then. Let's go get my skates."

I accepted his hand. I didn't realize then that taking this strange boy's hand would lead me to many things I didn't think I would ever experience.

Such as finding romance. And realizing that at one point, I wasn't important.

(a/n;I made some changes to this chapter and the next - I accidentally posted my first draft 😅)