strange love
@fnchanyeol
It was too late to be up on a Wednesday, at least for most. Taemin's hair was mused, a bored glaze to his eyes and a fresh burn on his wrist from an incident at work that involved hot coffee and a lack of attention. He kept compulsively pressing his thumb against the raw skin as he walked, an absentminded drag of a motion that had irritation bubbling up and twisting into pain. Taemin liked the night though, liked getting off of his shift to streets that were bordering on empty if he took the back alleys, liked the hum of neon lights and the way they flickered to life, advertising bars and booze and everything in between. He had a headphone jammed into his ear, the other dangling haphazardly from the cord near his thigh, the faint beat of an EDM track audible if you stood close enough to him – phone clutched against his palm with a playlist on loop.
The walk from the diner to Lemnos wasn't too bad, and Taemin generally used the time to unwind. He was halfway through with a cigarette, left it balanced loose between his lips and his time split between remembering to flick the building ash from the end of it and scrolling through his phone. He was distracted by typing his way one-handedly through a rambling text and exhaling out the buildup of smoke that was accumulating in his lungs, so much so that he didn't really notice that Chanyeol was hanging out on the steps in front of their building until he was right in front of him. In all fairness, the steps were a decent place to take a smoke break – it was easy to let claustrophobia overwhelm you when you lived in one of the cramped studios. But then, Taemin also didn't want anything to do with Chanyeol a good seventy percent of the time.
It had been a complicated sort of relationship that morphed into a terrible breakup when Taemin had decided he'd had enough of Chanyeol, that he'd had enough of them. But Taemin was a little twisted, selfish and desperate for attention and so when Chanyeol seemed so adamant about trying to rekindle, possessive words and angry eyes – well, he found an odd sort of joy in it all. A sick combination of pride, narcissism, and power that he'd never seemed to be able to have over Chanyeol when they’d been dating, when he was so easily forthcoming about everything, when there were no warped secrets to pick free from the possessions scattered around his apartment. It had been half the reason Taemin had gotten sick of it all, he hated feeling powerless.
Even now things between them were strange (though Taemin was often strange in general), a perplexing mix of Taemin flaring angry and argumentative when Chanyeol tried to talk to him on the floor of their apartments, of shouldering past him and pretending he didn't exist when he ran into him getting the mail. But then there were other times, tiny baits of moments like he was hinting that maybe there was a possibility of more for the sole purpose that Chanyeol wouldn't move past him completely, even if he had no intention of doing so. Taemin seemed to be gauging which mood he was going to slip into as he paused in front of him, had been planning on finishing his smoke before he went inside anyway and it had him shifting his weight on his heels, swayed to the side and let his hip rest against the metal rung of the railing. "What the hell are you doing out here?" he asked him before he took another drag, "it's like, what, two?" Taemin guessed at the time, glanced briefly down at his phone and then back up at the other.