❛ what is your name? ❜
“spencer?” he responds as if it’s a question, fingertips still tapping idly on the countertop of the seamstress’s shop. then, like every other time he gives his name to someone around here for the first time, catches himself, then repeats it again, this time the way jihoon does, with sounds better suited to korean than english, “spencer. yu. sorry,” he adds, with his typical sun-bright grin, “sometimes i forget.”
the restaurant’s wad of cash is thick in his pocket (it’s a miracle he didn’t somehow lose it on the way), and he can still see small collections of buttons scattered across floors, the floor of his bedroom, the floor of his living room, one particular mischievous pile swept carelessly under an industrial refrigerator in the crow’s nest kitchen. somehow jihoon had painted it as spencer’s fault that all of his work shirts had long since been destroyed, in spite of the fact that all spencer did was wear them, and then not wear them. buying new shirts over and over was hassle enough, and spencer could not be trusted to show up to work in brand new black and white button-downs when pink and blue and red and orange would always make for a viable, perfectly hilarious prank.
so jihoon sent him here, on this mission, to have new buttons sewn onto otherwise flawless, albeit well-worn shirts. they had to be starched too (spencer still isn’t entirely sure what starching actually entails), and the white ones bleached clean. you should iron them yourself, jihoon had implied, still as if he held no fault in the crumpled, tousled state of spencer’s shirts, it’ll build character.
“if you happened to ‘accidentally’ dye one of them neon green,” he half-jokes, resting his elbows on the counter and reaching up to fiddle idly with a nearby display, “i wouldn’t be disappointed.”
