Genre: Fluff(?) | 1.5K Words
You lift your hand gently to your lips, taking a long drawl of the cigarette clasped between your fingers, a smile gracing your face as the smoke wisps its way into your lungs.
It was a cold night, but you couldn’t care less, clad only in your sloppy pyjama shorts and a white shirt. The first night you went up there you weren’t sure what had compelled you to leave your fifth floor apartment and take the lift all the way up to the 36th when it would have been much easier to just have gone to the steps outside your apartment block. But you don’t regret it even in the slightest.
Your apartment block was dry to say the least. Filled with exhausted college students, single parents and old couples, you never had any major experiences albeit the occasional disapproving sounds you heard from the senior citizens on your way back in from a smoke.
You wanted a more exciting life. You always tell yourself, but in truth you were more than happy with what you had. Sure, it was boring. Sure, it’d be great to be out in the midst of the city rather than in one of the back alleyways leading out of it, but you were satisfied.
You didn’t expect to want to go after a man who you had met at the same place just nights ago. The man with shaky hands who’d lit your cigarette with his battered metal cased Zippo lighter, and stood with you in a comfortable silence. Much less did you expect to make a routine out of it.
Dragging your feet out of your apartment at 2 in the dead of the night and heading all the way to the 36th floor balcony had become a nightly routine now. You did it to see him, as embarrassing as that was to admit.
To see the way his slightly long hair hung just above his eyes, and the way he always tucked both hands into the pockets of his sweatpants to look for his lighter as if he didn’t know which pocket they were lying in. It was how he was so predictable in all his actions but unpredictable in all his words.
Now, knowing that you’d arrived earlier than he would, you lean forward and tip the ashes from your cigarette off the edge of the railings, waiting for him to arrive the same time he always did.
“Oh, you’re here.” you hear the voice you’d been waiting for call from behind you, and it takes every fibre in you not to break out in a stupid smile.
“tiring day today?” you ask, a question you’d only garnered courage to bring up the second time the two of you had met.
The man only nods, pulling his pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and sticking one in his mouth, fumbling around for his lighter immediately after. As always, the lighter is in his left pocket, and he raises his shaky hands to light the cigarette now clasp between his lips.
Only silence ensues for the next minute or so, but you don’t mind it, rather you appreciate it. It’s time to enjoy his presence as much as it’s time to be alone with your own thoughts.
You smile only slightly to yourself, the ring of his name sharp in your head from when he’d told you what it was just last night.
Yuta. You’d been referring to him as just 36th before then, and you’d simply never needed to know his name.
He gave you his number too, and although you didnt memorise it, you knew it was safely in your contact list, saved for when you finally put up the courage to drop him a text.
You glance back in his direction, only to see him with his head hung, his hair covering his eyes in a somewhat shaggy way, piled clump after clump.
He raises a hand to his lips, clasping the cigarette between his index and middle finger to pull it away, and lets out a deep sigh.
“Nothing quite like fresh air while you’re breathing in smoke into your lungs, right?” he remarks, and you can’t help but laugh at the attempt to crack a joke.
You meet him continuously for weeks, and eventually there comes the day he invites you over to his apartment.
It surprises you, to find that the man didn’t live on the 36th floor, but rather the 18th.
Just like you, he’d taken the lift up to the top of the building, for reasons you’d assumed to be the view, to take his midnight smoke.
He pushes open the apartment door carefully, and you kick off your shoes, stepping into the house and past the teak door frame carefully.
His apartment is small, but just right, not unlike yours. There are subtle differences in the layout, where the toilet is, where the bedroom door is facing, but otherwise the apartment might as well have been yours.
He’s quiet when he shuts the door, and when he goes to grab you a drink in the fridge, you watch as he stands with the light of the machine illuminating his face, scanning over it as if considering what you might prefer better.
Eventually he picks out beer, a can for you, one for him, and walks over to you with a slight hobble in his step.
“Do you drink?” he asks as he offers it to you, and you grunt.
Yuta sat beside you, leaned back on his couch as he stared at the TV before him, watching some old Japanese game show of some guy eating a leather shoe, an unamused expression burned on his face.
You take a short sip of your Asahi Superdry yet again, and he looks over at you, eyes locking with yours with an intensity that made it difficult to even consider tearing them away.
“Yes?” you whisper, afraid making too loud a noise would scare the man out of his trance, and he smiles, a gentle lopsided grin, before his eyes travel to your lips.
Isn’t this too cliche? You think, berating yourself for the cheesy situation you now found yourself in. As your face heats up, you become painfully aware of how red your face must look to the man before you, but yet you don’t budge, sat still, beer can in your hands.
He leans in towards you, your hands move up onto his shoulders, and you lean in too, slowly, until your faces were barely two inches away, and you repeat yourself.
He smiles. Now that he was so close to you, you could smell the cigarettes on his breath, and he could smell them on yours. His eyes flick upwards, now locked with yours, and your breath hitches.
He leans in closer, and so do you.
When his lips touch yours, your face heats up yet again, and you once again curse yourself for behaving like a teenager. Kissing you gently, his hands roam near your waist, not making contact in case you didn’t like it, a gentlemanly move you added to his list of charms.
You lean your body closer to him, not pulling your lips away from his in hopes he’d understand your gentle attempt at approval, and he does, hands grasping your waist, fingers pressing into the fabric on your skin.
You could barely remember the last time you were kissed, much less did you remember any details, but you were sure when you said you’d never felt a kiss quite like his before. The way he moved his lips on yours, the way that even if you opened your eyes to take a peek at his face, his eyes were kept closed, brows furrowed in concentration as if kissing you was the most important thing he had to do.
The taste of beer on his tongue should have been revolting, especially mixed with the heavy breath of tar the both of you shared, but you only wanted more. You pull back to catch your breath, and the man before you does so too.
When you look up at him again, his lips are swollen, eyes watery from having squeezed them shut, and his hair was messy from how you unconsciously ran your hands through it. He smiles, reaching a hand forward to brush a stray hair out of your eyes, opening his mouth to finally reply your question.
“Nothing. Just wanted to kiss you.”
“Can i let you in on a secret?” Yuta asks, though he knows you’d say yes. He’d gotten good at predicting your actions, given the number of times you’d come over, and the number of times he’d stopped by at your house after your nightly smokes.
Just as he expected you would, you nod, and the man chuckles, a faint chuckle, as he pulls an unlit cigarette out of its box and hands it to you.
“The first time I came here, I came here because I didn’t know what to do with my life, and I didn’t know what was real anymore. But looking at the distance to the ground, those 180 metres, just made it set in.” he begins, turning to look at you, the whites of his eyes standing out like sparks tangled in between strands of his jet black hair.
As he speaks, Yuta smiles, and at his smile, You unconsciously find yourself smiling back, fiddling with the unlit tab in your hands.
“I never planned to come up here everyday. I wanted to see you, and thought that if I just waited up there, maybe you’d come again. And you did.” A chuckle. “You were there before me.”
“I thought, wow. I needed to do this everyday. I needed to see you every day.” he continues, turning away to look at the skyline as he gulps, looking nervous, an emotion you hardly ever observed on him.
“So, I know this is random.” Yuta let’s out as he digs in his pocket, yet again his left, and pulls out his lighter.
“But will you be my girlfriend?”
You look down at his outstretched hands when he pops the question, and immediately tears begin to well in your eyes.
His shaky hands, the ones you remember, stretching out his beaten up lighter your way.
A/N: I think the ending is so choppy help 💀💀
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