2am.
you make me wanna open up my chest , baby, this is more than sex see you feel it too, you know that you and I connect but something isn't right jaekyu & dani. old park. 2am.
jaekyu is an unlucky black cat of a thing. his fur is sticky with superstition. mangy eared and skirting the edges of society. but somehow well fed. well-meaning passerby curious enough to toss out a can of tuna and scratch behind his ears. until some accident or another happens, and it’s blamed on him. except it’s not all superstition, it’s real. like a noxious gas that rolls off of him in waves. collects at people’s ankles and trips them. eventually drowns them, chokes them if they stay long enough. that’s what he thinks, anyway. it always seems to get worse the longer he’s around someone. it sucks, it’s complete bullshit, because jaekyu is’t built for solidarity. he’s not content to sit alone, to sprawl across his bed for days at a time. it collects like rocks, heavy in his chest. weighs him down into an abyss of loneliness and keeps him there.
but what can he do about it? a harbinger of bad, of misfortune, of death. that’s what he can piece together. but he doesn’t have any goddamn answers. he just is. go jaekyu, twenty-three, high school graduate (barely), smart mouth (with a police record). part of the wadded up scum that makes up the muddy puddles of hemlock. at least it helps keep people away.
except lately.
he’s been hanging around kang dani. it feels like high school all over again. sucking down cigarettes in side alleys and flirting like he doesn’t care what the fuck happens with his life. smiles and hands and reckless enough not to worry about the destruction he leaves in his wake. like this dose of unknowing. yeah, sure, i’ll make his pen explode on his test. but it’s not that bad. that sort of thing. the kind of bad luck you can live with. the kind of bad luck you don’t really feel terrible about giving out.
not the big sort. it’s almost like the idea of it is wiped away like a dry-erase board. this won’t happen. can’t happen. not anymore, at least not around her. it just feels like it’s true. so he goes along with it. because everything is easier without the knowledge of sin, or guilt, or repercussions.
focuses instead on skating lazy loops around the park in the dim flicker of streetlamps, concrete broken and cracked from too many skateboards of the past, and not enough construction of the future. until dani shows up, her dark swish of a ponytail bobbing like a ribbon in the breeze. he yanks at it when he skates by like he might be in third grade, but tucks his hand in her back pocket when he clatters off his board and pulls her into a kiss immediately after, half-stumbles them both a couple of steps back in the process. their teeth click, jaekyu laughs, steals the gum from underneath her tongue and pulls back looking too triumphant for a boy whose prize is rubbery candy with the flavor chewed out of it.