Dark times all around but there are still people out there who love you
Do not hurt yourself, do not hurt others, get help, talk to someone, anyone. Humanity has survived before and we can do it now if we all just support each other. My country and my people let me down and endangered my life but there’s nothing I or anyone else can do about that so let’s try to spread the love that is so clearly lacking.
Author’s Note: I know this one took me a while and it’s very different from anything I’ve written for this blog but I can honestly say that I’m pretty in love with it. Whether that’s a good thing or not remains to be seen but I hope you guys enjoy it. As a small favor, I ask that you don’t request a part two or ask for a similar scenario for a different artist. This scenario is a bit of a fluke.
“Just promise you won’t fall in love with me,” you said.
“I won’t,” he lied.
Her makeup was too thick.
It was the one thing he couldn’t help but notice as he watched the surprise flicker across the hostess’s bony features when he told her that he wanted to sit at the counter instead of his usual table.
She was beautiful in that tragic sort of way that only comes with the knowledge that he was witnessing something quickly fading. She was all too aware of it too. The pains she took to perfect her eyeliner to draw attention away from the fine lines forming across her forehead. The way her dress had been pressed just so to accentuate the swing of her hips as she walked. All of it stood as evidence to the dreams she couldn’t bring herself to give up yet.
She dreamt of romance, the kind that could leave her breathless atop silk sheets, as she hauled overfilled garbage bags to the dumpster. Lost herself in her imagination as she corralled families into the gaudy red and white booths. She pictured herself laughing over glasses of champagnes she couldn’t pronounce as she retied the bun in her hair; ignoring the way her hairline was starting to thin from the repetition.
Her dreams were filled with anything but the resignation of being the hostess at the diner on the corner of East 53rd and Park for the rest of her life but it was a fate she’d already succumbed to.
Because it was the one, undeniable fact of the city: in some way or another, everything succumbed to the diner.
It was a living relic from the 1950s; built on a desolate lot which it clung to like an inoperable cancer. The otherwise uniform blocks curved to accommodate its parking lot. It was always gleaming, even under the dim light of the street lamps, to lure drunken masses to its doorstep. A little silver bullet embedded amongst apartment complexes and high-rise office buildings.
It was the absurdity of it, the sheer defiance, that drew him there and wove him into the unspoken routine of the place that had been cultivated by the decades. A guestbook filled with names, miniature histories, each lightly penciled over another. There was a mind numbing sameness to it all that went unbroken day in and day out except for him, now, as he slid onto the unfamiliar stool at the counter and ordered a coffee.
He watched you from his seat at the kitchen table as you ran your hand across the albums that lined his bookshelves. You let your fingertips linger a moment longer on your favorites, Queen, Bob Dylan, Fleetwood Mac, until you found the one you were looking for and pulled it off of the shelf.
You’d only just woken up but already you were desperate for noise. He knew how much you couldn’t stand silences. Silence was too loud. It left people with too many opportunities to say things.
He wished that he’d taken a picture of you. The way you hovered over his record player in nothing but your underwear, the sun streaming in from the bay window to highlight some of the marks he’d left on your stomach the night before, as you set the needle on the outer vinyl grooves.
The opening notes of Otis Redding’s “Cigarettes and Coffee” filled the room and Dean closed his eyes momentarily to let the music wash over him.
“I could get used to this,” he thought. A sentiment which would have terrified you if he’d said it out loud. Just like when you found a toothbrush for you in the cabinet beside his own. A negligible detail that made you retreat further into yourself.
But the mornings after you indulged him enough to stay the night were some of his favorite things. There was an ease to the motions of it all that seemed almost effortless if only for a moment.
He opened his eyes again when he felt your leg slip over him, slowly settling your weight in his lap, as you rolled your hips to the lazy beat of the song.
“Sing for me,” you said, hooking your arms around his neck.
He arched his eyebrow at you, wondering what game you were playing, as you tried your best to look innocent. He suppressed a groan as he cleared his throat and felt your hips roll again.
“But it seemed so natural, darlin-“
Before he could finish the line, your lips were pressed against his, muffling his voice. You pulled away when you felt his shoulders relax underneath your arms as he gave into you, smirking at the exasperated look on his face, and running your fingers through his hair the way you knew he liked.
“What was that?” You pouted. “Don’t you want to sing for me?”
He opened his mouth again, eyes narrowed squarely at you, but this time you didn’t let him get a single note out before you were kissing him. Starting at the base of his neck and trailing across him jawline as he tilted his head back to give you more room until he couldn’t take your teasing anymore.
He thrust his hips upwards to meet yours, his palms spread firmly on your back to press you closer to him so that he could run his tongue along your exposed sternum, making you shiver.
“Dean!”
You gasped his name before you could stop yourself. Felt his lips curling into a smile against your skin as he stood, splaying you across the kitchen table, your hands already tugging at his belt.
“I could get used to this,” he thought.
“You’re crazy!” You squealed as you felt his arms circling around your waist and hoisting you into the air.
You flailed your feet out in front of you, a futile effort to break free, which only made him laugh harder.
“This is what you get for being difficult.”
The ice cream you’d smeared across his mouth when you caught him trying to take a picture of the two of you was still cold as he nuzzled into the nape of you neck.
“Dean! You’re going to regret this!”
You could hear the smile in his voice as he spoke.
“Oh I’m sure I will but for now,” he paused to grab his camera off of the pool chair and held it out in front of you. “Smile!”
He knew you didn’t understand why he insisted on taking so many pictures of you. That you would rather he lived in the moment than behind a camera lens. But this was one moment he never wanted to forget. The two of you as you were now; bickering, smiling, together. He never wanted to forget who he was when he was with you.
“See? That wasn’t so bad,” he said as he tossed the camera back onto the chair and hugged you closer, his cheek sticking on the back of your neck, before he fell backwards into the pool and let the water envelop both of you.
His head was already swimming by the time the waitress appeared. Early signs of caffeine withdrawal that he had been ignoring for years. She slid an empty coffee mug across the counter and filled it in front of him; leaving no room for cream.
“Should I put your order in, sweetie?” she asked, letting her arm brush casually against his. She smelled of fresh cigarettes.
“I’ve lost my appetite.”
His response came out more coldly than he’d meant it which made him oddly grateful when she shrugged.
“Let me know when you find it again,” she winked before heading off to collect her plates that were waiting in the pickup window.
The first sip was always so deliciously bitter. He leaned against the back of seat as it slithered down to the pit of his stomach and let the white noise of clattering dishes fade away.
He wished that he had never rounded the corner. Never stumbled through the bedroom doorway and found you staring dumbstruck at the diamond ring in your hand.
“Dean…”
Your voice came out as a whisper as if his name felt too painful on your tongue.
“It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.”
“Dean…,” you said again, your hand curling tightly around the band.
You swallowed the lump in your throat, but when you looked up at him and saw the fear in his eyes, you felt the tears spill over onto your cheeks.
“Please,” he begged, taking a hesitant step towards you. “Please just stay. That’s all I’m asking.”
He leaned his head into your hand as you reached up to cup his cheek. You stroked it absently with your thumb before standing on your toes to kiss him. You felt his body shake, crumpling into your embrace, as you slipped the ring into his hand.
“You ask too much of me.”
“Not that table.”
The sound of your voice snapped him back to reality as he looked over to see you in the front doorway, your eyes brimming with pity as the hostess stumbled over the lines she’d rehearsed for the second time that morning.
His heart was pounding. Suddenly the features of your face that had begun to blur in his mind were sharpened back to high definition. The scattered memories that had become his daydream all funneled down to one lasting image. You.
A figure loomed close behind you and he watched as an arm wrapped around your shoulders, pulling you so close to him that you had to stumble to regain your balance, as he asked you what was wrong. You cringed at his touch as if you were utterly repulsed by it and Dean knew that this other guy had already lost you. Another one that tried in vain to hold you down. Another name on your list of failures. Another disappointment.
“I don’t like the view from there,” you said.
The hostess shot Dean a look as she guided them to a table in the middle of the dining room but he looked away. You hadn’t noticed him yet. It was the one advantage he had.
He wasn’t sure if it was just his imagination playing up again but when he looked back at you, he swore he saw your hand trace across the top of your usual table when you passed it.
I’m suffocating
Your place or mine?
Pick me up in ten
Already you were clamoring to strip away each other’s clothes, your legs coiling around him out of habit, urging his hips to pin you harder into the leather that lined the backseat. It had been so long. Months of agonizing silence pent up, threatening to boil if either of you had to wait the short car ride back to his place, and he bitterly admitted to himself that in your hatred of silences, you were perfectly matched.
His mouth worked against yours. He pried the words that had gone too long unspoken from your throat and swallowed them greedily only to replace them with his own. Your nails dug into his shoulder blades and your back arched to meet his chest as another spasm shook your body
He’d gone numb the day you left. He made himself forget the way you tasted. The way you moved so exquisitely underneath him. Every time was like your first time together. It was foreign and hungry as if you were fighting to lose yourselves in one another completely.
And it dawned on him as he sat back and watched you slump, panting and spent against the seat, that it was only in the distance that had grown between you where you could thrive. Only when you were strangers to one another were you comfortable enough to lay your demons out on display for him. You were like water afraid of stagnating and the tighter he held onto you, the more that you slipped through his fingers.
Dean knelt down, his hands slowly massaging your legs apart, enjoying how it made you quiver. If distance is what you needed, so be it. He took one last look at you before he bit down on your inner thigh. Hard.
Both of you recognized the song almost immediately as the opening notes began to play over the aging ceiling speakers. Cigarettes and Coffee.
You barely heard your date as he excused himself to the bathroom and Dean knew what you must have been thinking. When his eyes found you, you were looking over at the booth by the window.
The usual table. The one you’d sat at together every morning since the first night you decided to stay and too many times after you’d left. Always you drowning in one of his flannels that was two sizes too big for you. Always him shifting in his seat whenever the scratches on his back began to itch.
The table where you sat together shoveling overloaded forkfuls of pancakes between your lips as the lust faded from your eyes. Anything to keep your mouths full so that no one dared to ask the question that was hung palpable in the air between you: What the fuck are we doing here again?
Because you hadn’t figured out what he’d known since the moment he saw you. Part of him doubted that you ever would. You were too adept at lying to yourself to realize that some people never leave you even after they’re gone. That even after you forget the sound of their voice, you can still smell them on your skin, still feel it sting in the places where they used to kiss you.
You glanced at the bathroom door as you dug the phone from your pocket, staring hesitantly at the screen before typing something quickly, and setting the phone face down on the table.
Dean heard his phone vibrate on the counter beside him but he knew what it said even before he read the message.
When you hear it finally dropped and it’s not a drill:
Hurrying to listen to it immediately before the site crashes
And at some point you realize the beat has taken control of your body
That moment you read the translations and realize that “Suga,” “Yoongi,” and “Agust D” are three very different sides of the same person
And you just know that a live performance is going to be lit af
When the mixtape is over and you can’t process what just happened
