break me apart in all the ways that matter
@neosy
“i just need you here for support, you know?” she insists for probably the fifth time since arriving in the food court, her words bent and mushy around the hour-old bubble gum she’s still chewing out of sheer force of habit, the worry gnawing at her insides similarly. she feels sick, nauseous, nervous, regretting having gotten a basket of orange chicken just for it to sit in front of her on the table, cold and inedible now, tilted and toppled every which way by her fork for the past twenty minutes while they’ve waited here. “you don’t even have to do anything, just sit there and look pretty, you can play on your phone, whatever. i just don’t want to get murdered or anything by a stranger, right?” she tries to say it like a joke, she tries to say it like a quip, like a pun, like something out of a cartoon she used to watch when she was smaller and still believed her parents when they told her they were her parents.
so many things have changed since then.
she doesn’t even glance over at her cousin as she speaks to him, her eyes too preoccupied, scanning the ebbing crowds around them, the mall high class and beautiful but busy nonetheless, everything clean and expensive, but growing chaotic by the second. she wishes there weren’t so many people here, she wishes she’d picked a different meeting place, somewhere outside perhaps, somewhere under the sun where her bright red heart-shaped shades would actually make sense instead of being simply a fashion accessory. she has to wear them anyway, to match her crop top and earrings, but at least outside she would have had more directions to bolt, should this meeting turn absolutely sour.
she has no idea what to expect, honestly. finding out that she has a birth mom who’d given her away as a baby was harrowing enough, that her parents aren’t her parents, that her family isn’t her family, but then also finding out that the woman who’d discarded her went and adopted another child at some point felt like both a blessing and a slap. she can’t organize her emotions, she can’t set anything straight. she doesn’t even know what he looks like, having only contacted him through a genetics blog he hadn’t ever bothered to change the anonymous features of.
she chews her gum and bounces her knee against her chair, her other leg pinned between her torso and the table, and flips one of the orange chicken pieces over, picking at her own nails absentmindedly. where is he, where is he, where is he, why is he making her wait so long, why isn’t he here yet? she inhales, exhales, tells herself she doesn’t need to text him again.
strangely enough, as soon as he steps around a far corner, she knows it’s him instantly. she’s never seen him before, he looks like no one to her, like nothing to her, a complete stranger, a foreign entity, but the way he turns and searches the space around her, gazing, frowning, hunting; she knows it’s him. and he’s not like anything she’d expected, blonde and tall and all in black like a funeral; he strides into the area with all the subtlety of a knife cutting through butter, something impossibly direct about it, impatient, powerful, unkind, inconsiderate of everyone else in his vicinity. she can hear his boots against the floor even over the cacophony of the cafeteria, see the seriousness in his features as he passes her by, like she’s a cowering creature against the onslaught of a roving storm.
she doesn’t like that comparison. she pushes herself to her feet, and even though she is not tall, she still stands as straight as possible. “jaewon yang?”
he flips around, yanked on by the sound of his name and she catches her first sight of his eyes, oddly yellow, bright against the surrounding fluorescence. “lianna devereaux?”
she nods and he steps closer to her, carefully, cautiously, blinking as they formally meet each other, and she gets the sense he’s sizing her up, taking her measure, aligning her with her mother and contrasting the two. how does she match up? how does she fit, in his eyes? “this is my cousin, neo,” she introduces, gesturing vaguely towards him, shooting him a nervous glance as she sits back down again.
jaewon yang sits down across from her, his eyes on the other male for a moment. “the back up, i assume?”