❛ don’t make me regret giving you the aux cord. ❜
source - platonic sentence starters
Renato rolled the thin black cord between finger and thumb. When he was a kid, he had a well-loved stereo on which he’d play his CDs. Even as the digital age crept in, he’d still clung to the old ways of physical copies. Inseparable in his mind was the haptic feedback of pressing down the disc, pushing the cover over it and clicking the play button. It was what he’d known—and what he’d known had always been most comfortable to Renato. Unlike Thalita, he had his ways and stuck to them.
It wasn’t until the kite shop that he’d finally, begrudgingly, made the switch to aux cords and digital playlists. It was a compromise with Thalita—one of practicality. He couldn’t deny hooking a phone up to a speaker and letting an algorithm play an endless stream of songs was more reliable than his unwieldy wallet of CDs.
Amidst the rolling, thieving Fog, where things could be lost so easily, such a method also seemed more practical.
The cord found its way into the music player with a twist and a click. Something borrowed from the Fog, its place here no doubt more transitory than his. The speaker system came alive with his music of choice: A relaxed bossa nova with a steady, body-moving beat. Renato tapped his thighs and foot in time with it, rocking himself side to side ever so slightly as though he were a metronome.
“Regret, eh? Not so faithful in me,” Renato remarked, shimmying on his seat in a sort of half-dance motion. “Don’t you want to dance?” They certainly danced to it in the retirement home. And they, unlike Jake or Renato, had much more of an excuse not to.
“And what would you normally listen to, hm? You seem like a…” He hummed in thought, still keeping a steady beat with his hands and legs. “...Country,” he finally concluded, in his best worst ‘American’ accent, "person. Is that right? Or...Wrong completely?" He chuckled. A rare sound in the Fog.