deoksu empties a bag of onion rings on the table and organizes them from the roundest to the most oblong. his stomach complains but he doesn’t eat them, glancing at her when a slight breeze takes the empty bag on an adventure across the street and into the nearest alley. he’s still in his homeplus uniform, having sprinted from the electronics section to the door when his shift was over, nametag pinned sideways and in desperate need of a wash.
“i’m with you on the ‘rage-filled’ thing.”
he responds without thought, biting the inside of his cheek when there’s a mistake in his unorthodox organization. if there was one trait neither he nor deokhyun were blessed with, it was the skill to remain neat in the most trying of times. deoksu curses a higher power for granting him dashing good looks but nothing practical. “nicest, though?” his brows furrow until the space between them wrinkles. “sweetest?”
an onion ring crunches between his teeth when he deems his work satisfactory and deoksu leans back in the plastic chair, grateful for the light post behind him. haeun is the closest thing he has to a best friend (female, at least, because no one could replace mousy little minjae) but their banter… okay, frenemies may be a more accurate term, but since when did he care about that?
“i think you’re a little delusional,” he chooses the smallest onion ring to emphasize his words, “just a little.”
what once was a look of self-assurance and anticipation deflates into one of muted disdain, and it remains to be one of their many constants. (one of them being the recurring question of: why are we friends again?) the roll of her eyes is complementary, at best, and wandering fingers make a slow crawl across the tabletop with intent of disrupting his ... work, for lack of better word. she nudges a piece out of line with the pettiness of a six-year-old toddler and a twenty-two-year-old son haeun.
“i resent that,” she protests past a scowl, eyes darting upwards only to send a resentful look his way. if anything, she was nice and sweet enough for someone so rage-filled. surely that counted for something. tight-lipped does she pluck the onion ring from between his fingers, gnawing on the salty snack with more force than necessary. “i think you’re a little shit but i’ve never said that out loud.” (a false claim.)
besides, she didn’t know a lot of people—not as well as she knows her ... uhh, heart. so by grace of technicalities and statistics, she wasn’t wrong. “are you just bitter that i said you looked like a moldy piece of bread?” haeun decides belatedly mid-crunch that she didn’t like the onion rings she was stealing off off her friend. her hand moves compulsively across the tabletop anyway. “i was just looking out for you, you know? no one wants to look like an old carb.”