The Superstar's Autograph
_Chapter Thirty-Two

[ Dedicated to Sulfuctious @honey25_6
@kpoptrash_794]

Credits to the original owner of the video and for the lyrics, thank you so much.

Song: Strawberries & Cigarettes (Troye Sivan)
Cover by: Lee Eun Sang

P.S. This is a NEW version of this chapter.

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"Answer me..." I asked as I pored over to him. "Yibo..." I clamped on the sleeve of his denim jacket. "Please answer me. Will you marry me?"

He obtained air inward to his nostrils and the faint of his exhalation was intangibly varnished with apprehension, "I don't think I could..."

"Why? What's wrong? Because of what? I have bipolar? That is why you couldn't?" I goaded, brooking the disgust I had for my life. Why am I not born with upright mental health?!

"It's not, Zhan." Yibo tensed up, he gritted his teeth. "It just that...Zoey's for you. Not me."

Why would he change his mind?!

"I thought..." This was bloodcurdling to me. "I thought it is okay for you that I have bipolar. I will take my medicines, excessive therapies from now on and do whatever the doctors said I have to do to lessen my condition...I won't skip or get away from them. If you are worried that after any minute I'll change my mind, don't. This has nothing to do with my depression or manic phase, I love you. Marry me please..."

"Zhan, I'm sorry but..."His words pounded me like flying concrete blocks. "I-I can't." He couldn't seem to find the right word as he struggled scanning my reddish lips from my own biting.

My unfazed vision shifted to glassy and tears oozed out, issuing along the bridge of my nose. I disappointingly scraped them away with my fist. "Is it not enough? Me liking and loving you? Am I too late in figuring things up with my feelings? Or is this means...Nothing to you? Is this your intentions all along? Confusing and dropping me after hearing my confession?"

Yibo's tongue went under the side of his bottom lip, eyebrows rutted and unquestionably thinking as he looked at me, "Yes. I only made you to fall in love with me and tonight the drama will end. All that you did to me, all that I did to you means nothing...This confession of yours doesn’t change anything. If you are drained; I am too to this love and hate relation that connected us, to this asinine linkage we entoiled ourselves into."

My inaudible mewl glided around us. "Asinine? Foolish?" [A/N: Asinine means extremely or utterly foolish.]

"Yes Zhan, foolish!" Yibo's irises switched to darker tinge of brown, "I can’t love a bipolar person like you. I have to distance myself, I need to put space in the midst of us two. I need to disappear in your life like you did in mine when you asked Zoey to marry you or to those days you were advocating for me to go...You are crusading to tear whatever we had, Zhan because in your heart you knew you love Zoey more than me…SO STOP MAKING ME RUN AROUND YOUR PALM. STOP GIVING ME FRAUDULENT HOPE."

“I admit that I do love Zoey but after meeting you everything changed. Please forgive me…I am so sorry for being like this.” I whimpered to him.

“Don’t apologize; it’s not your fault. It is mine. If I hadn’t become a superstar, asked you to kiss me for my autograph and if we stayed as strangers then maybe someway our lives would be in peace. Zhan Zhan, I need to be able to live my own life now without thinking about you and still be alright. I've taken the time to realize that I am giving so much of me in exchange for not nearly as much of you. I depended on the misconception that one day you'll like or love me but yes you did just an hour late, I waited for you to see me, the only human being who loves you more than himself... Yet I can't do it any longer, I love you too but I have to love me more...Let us go back to our previous existence. I will do my best not to feel broken. I hope you are too."

"What are you burbling?!" The volume of my voice maximized in agitation. I poked him in his hard chest. "Tell me you are lying!"

"I am not. This time I know what to do. I have to open the cap of that Mason jar where I captive you because keeping you to myself will only impair your wings...You are unchained now, butterfly." The conflict in his eyes was visible, he was probably deciding between leaving me all alone in the hospital or doing his idea to supplicate me to discard him. "I will forsake you for real. ‘For real' as you always said to me before presenting a temporary farewell; today let's make it a permanent goodbye. I love you enough to let you go. You have to look after yourself."

Through all that thinking going our separate brains, it was when I sort out that he has bloodshot eyes too. He was also weeping. I DAMAGED HIM SO BAD... If we linger to this relationship then we will only end up breaking each other hearts, he was not in the wrong track. He was right. We have to slash this thin thread of web that binds us. If I had just talked with him a little more, things wouldn’t gotten out of hand…

With a half-hearted smile, I manifest a lament breath, “I will. Uhm…This may not be the brightest idea I’ve ever come up with but Yibo...can...can you spend one night with me before we go to our personal paths? Just for tonight? Can I be with you?”

He chewed his bottom lip and touched the base of his neck.

Cogitating...Pondering...

“Alright. I’ll be with you tonight.”

“Thank you…Yibo?” A piece of retrospection blasted on my mind, “How did you recognize me anyway? If you were that kid outside of the walls in Henan and we didn't see each other, how did you know it was me at the backstage of your concert in Beijing?”

“It was the first secret I told you about… Being your friend with paper airplanes…”He moistened his lips with his tongue, "Want to know the second one?" He proposed at last. He didn't expect an answer and persisted, "I personally met you before that time you asked for my autograph."

“What do you mean?” We’ve met before?! “Before Zoey and I become a couple?!”

"I guess so, you were nineteen and I was sixteen..."

Oh right, finding or having a girlfriend at the age of nineteen not once crossed my senses, "Where?! And how did you know my age at that moment?" I enquired idiotically.

"You said it yourself..." Yibo pitched out his phone and verified the digital clock. "It's six thirty, let's go before your fiancé and dad see us. They’re here somewhere. I’ll refresh your memories."

Nineteen year old me? What happened back then?

After lacing up my shoes in the room I've been confined earlier. From the hospital, we headed to his means of transportation. A fresh painted black Chevy, not like the old rusty one he drove around Beijing, in his pink hoodie with me on the passenger seat. As he rolled down the window, I rested my elbow and my head on the side, looking at him from the corner of my eye.
Where are we going?

It was a short drive before we pulled up to a certain place, a Korean high school. The lights of the classrooms were still lit with students still studying and taking classes inside of the buildings in the other section of the gate. Yibo wheeled to the entrance and parked the transport in a lot as he killed the engine; we got out from the pickup truck and slammed the doors shut. He then reached my side and put his hand on my waist.

We traipsed leisurely in the school grounds as he described a story that precipitately transported me back to the old days after I left Henan. I remained there for three years. As you know, at fourteen, I went there with the lady doctor and met Yibo who was in his summer break from attending his middle school in China; I made friends with him without knowing his face yet he knew mine from the patient records his sister's been keeping and analyzing every single day. He snooped at it, learned that the boy in the photos was me, his first crush and purposely made his cat ran to me. We became friends, his plan worked to get close to me. WANG YIBO IS IN FACT THE DEITY OF BRIBERIES AND SCHEMES… IN A GOOD WAY THOUGH. On the last day of his vacation, he said that he had to go back to 'the city', he meant this city, Seoul Korea. Not Beijing anymore. After that sunshine season, he didn’t come back again for the reason that his father brought him here to attend high school and the lad used his breaks for productive activities like modeling in an apparel company for teens and working other part-time jobs to save money for his education.

“Here we are.” We reached a certain setting where wooden tables and chairs circled an antediluvian soaring tree with thin long vines hanging freely in the air. Because its winter, I didn't see any leaves or enchanting flowers blossoming on the familiar branches but only the strong skeleton remains of the plant. Yibo pulled me to a bench that was near to disintegrate and covered by snow.

He indicated with his palm. “I've met you here, at this very spot. You were smoking and I am eating strawberries...A fourteen year old you didn’t change even a bit from those document photos...And at nineteen you looked exactly the same...”

Resuscitated memories proliferated to me...Like fast drops of rain hitting me on my face. “At that age of nineteen, I once again rebelled in contradiction of my dad's orders and ran away from home. With my credit cards I fled to Korea. Wasted with my manic state, I hopped from one club to another, partying here and there, learning to drink liquors and smoke cigarettes too. With a rented Porsche a thought crushed to me. ‘What if I go to an institution and experience what it's like to be a student for once in my life?’ I've been isolated from people and homeschooled for too long so that was kinda sounded great to me, I decided to do it. I randomly picked a school, this one."

I slipped a glance at him, he was listening intuitively. "Paying the gatekeeper..." I remember that dude was a coach of this school’s soccer team or something…"He provided me a spare uniform and let me wandered around for a day...Then I found this location and get the pack of my cigarettes…"

"But you didn't have a lighter..." He added.

"And you approached me cooperatively...an innocent high schooler." That’s my first impression to him. "But why did you do that?"

“Why not? The subject of my dreams every night showed up...I already memorized your face like the back of my hand, how could I forget you? I took it as a once in a lifetime opportunity to see the real you, in flesh. You robbed my heart when I was eleven; you did it again when I was sixteen.”

He really did admire me since…

"And at twenty-two...I promise to myself that I will never let you slip through my fingers again..."

But you did...We both linked our gazes. Yibo and I had many sweet memories but we took it all for granted...

Kaleidoscopic as the environment in Summer I retained the memoirs of my past. “And I said to you…”

“Light my cigarette.” He carried on my incomplete phrase, suppressing a chuckle “So, I ran to my bully and borrowed a lighter...I don't care if they'll torment me...” He smirked at what he revealed. "I lit your cig with it and we talked...exchanged our names and age..."

The recollection glitch on my mind and I failed to remember after that specific occasion. “Then what happened?”

“You kissed me.”

“Yibo...” I touched my lips automatically. "It was my...first kiss...right?" Why the hell I asked him that?! IT WAS MY FIRST KISS! WHAT THE HELL?! WHY THE HELL DID I DO THAT?! I KISSED A RANDOM PERSON! I AM LUCKY IT WAS YIBO… “I always assumed Zoey was my first kiss...”

“No, I am your first kiss. I am the thief who stole your first kiss.”

Why did you hide this from me? You knew all along…

“And I am to you...” I phonated. “Sorry.”

“Apology accepted.” He grinned, I tried to match it but I couldn't.

“I have a last song for you Zhan Zhan before we tread to our unconnected paths. I wish you nothing but the world...okay?”

“Yeah. Thanks...” I nodded.

"When did you stop smoking by the way?"

Trickled of fluids escaped my eyes. “On that day.” The ‘escaping away’ stunt I pulled to my dad lasted for one day, his goons traced me and shipped me back to our house until I went to university, pursue the profession I wanted and turned into Zoey's boyfriend.

“I am pleased to know. Stay there, Zhan Zhan I'll serenade you...”

Cliché...but I'm going to miss this...

He walked to a group of boys with musical instruments in their hands that were obviously eavesdropping at us in the seats closed by. After a few words, one of them handed him an acoustic guitar. He seated himself on the top of a ligneous board and cleared his throat as he stared at me. His fingers worked over the guitar in a fluid motion that filled the atmosphere.

Remember when we first met
You said "Light my cigarette"
So I lied to my mom and dad
I jumped the fence and I ran
But we couldn't go very far
Cause you locked your keys in your car~~~

He continued the song with total seamless lines, harmonically singing with his chords. Wang Yibo played over the guitar like an ace, he looked down at the strings he was plucking and a small smile wormed on his lips. Then the Korean lyrics floated, astounding me and his spectators. Wait...AUDIENCES?! He is an idol after all...

There was a mass of students watching him with their astonished eyes, hands rested on their chest. The song lightened their burden…It exacerbated mine. 

Waenji moreuge
Geureon gibuni deuldeora
Uriui chueogeul
Nammollae ssaheun deuthan
I gyeojeori doraolttae
Tteoollyeo han beon deo
Aneukhan shigansoge
Pamudhyeo geudaero~~~

Some schoolgirls filmed the whole occurrence; I knew it will be going to show up on any social media platforms subsequently, I'll make sure to create an anonymous account on Weibo or Oasis later so that I can download what he did tonight as a reminder of his last song for me...Reminder of him...

Headlights on me
Racing to sixty I've been a fool
Strawberries and cigarettes
Always taste like you~~~

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TO BE CONTINUED.

Thank you for giving this book a chance!