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three times - acceptingfor @zenivth
send ▲ for five three times my muse thought about kissing yours, and the one time they do.
one. paris, france. it’s six in the morning; she’s stayed the night again. jaemin’s apartment is far nicer than hers is, making it the perfect alternative to sleeping alone in a cramped, drafty little hole on top of a brownstone building in the middle of paris. she rubs her eyes and sits up on the sofa that the two teens had fallen asleep on the night before. the pale morning light filters through the windows and past the thin curtains. jaemin’s features glow with the paris sunrise, his messy hair a halo alight with the luminescence of day. he looks fragile. sua studies the elements of her friend’s face— the high cheekbones, the thick, straight brows that furrow themselves in jaemin’s sleep, the aristocratic slope of his nose. she looks at his slightly parted lips and thinks about how easy it would be to just lean down and kiss him. she wishes she had the nerve to do this when he wasn’t asleep. before she can do anything about it, jaemin stirs and opens one bleary eye. “ what time is it?” he asks, voice husky. she sighs and tries to laugh off her thoughts. “it’s too early is what it is,” she replies, lying back down next to him and pulling the covers up to her shoulders. “let’s go back to sleep.”
two. the last performance sua watches before she goes back to korea in three weeks is jaemin’s. it’s a bit of a tradition that the two of them have, you see. they show up to each other’s performances (he with a bouquet of flowers and she with a small cake) and fill in for the family that didn’t follow them to paris. she buys tickets to a section that’ll put her right in front of the cello section of the orchestra even though she knows that he’ll be too busy watching the conductor to spare a glance at her. the pieces that the symphony play that night are vaguely familiar (maybe only because she’d heard jaemin hum snippets of his part), but she watches as if it’s the first time she’s ever heard an orchestra play before. the look in jaemin’s eyes is familiar. it’s the same look she gets when she dances, the same look the conductor has as he leads the orchestra further into shostakovich’s works. under the bright stage lights, in the stuffy suit that sua’s sure jaemin can’t wait to get out of, long fingers dancing along the neck of his cello, he is beautiful. when the performance ends and the audience finishes their standing ovation, sua hurries backstage with a cake from their favorite bakery and this time, a bouquet as well. she finds him putting away his cello, his bow tie loosened around his neck. “hey!” she chirps, walking towards him. pushing the cake box into his hands, she smiles. “you already know what this is,” she says, tapping the brown box knowingly. “but i wanted to give you this—” she moves the bouquet from behind her back and holds it out to him, beaming. “—too!” she looks up at him, a little sad that this is the last time she’ll run backstage to give jae cake after a concert, that this is only the first time she’s gotten him flowers. she wants to go up on her tiptoes (she would’ve gone on pointe for the hell of it, if she’d had her shoes) and kiss him just because, but she just flings her arms up around his neck and hugs him. “thank you,” she whispers. in the din of an entire post-performance orchestra backstage, sua doesn’t know if he hears her. god, she hopes he doesn’t.
three. jaemin sees her off to her flight. she’s seventeen and he’s nineteen when she leaves; stuck in a limbo stage between being a child and an adult. they’ve both made up their minds to be quite chic and sophisticated at the airport; a beautiful goodbye and then she’s gone. but as soon as sua sees her gate, she feels a frown tugging at the corners of her lips and heat rising in her cheeks. suitcases in hand, she whirls around to look at jaemin. “promise you’re going to write me.” she says, but it’s less of a demand than it is a question. “we’re going to keep in contact, right?” her voice wavers a little. maybe she’s only known jaemin for a couple of years, but he’s her best friend. surely a few thousand miles couldn’t beat that. sua wipes away a tear stubbornly with the back of her hand, mad at herself for even being this upset in the first place. they stand in front of the terminal like this for a while, this mismatched pair, and then the flight attendant calls for all passengers for flight KE902 to make their way to the gate. sua breathes in deeply and tugs on jaemin’s sleeve. “they- i gotta go,” she says, trying not to cry again. she looks up at him, eyes threatening to spill over with tears again, and she squeezes his hand. she feels like she ought to kiss him. at least as a final gesture. at least to try to end this crush of hers on a light note. but she doesn’t. she breaks away and tries to smile at him one last time, waves goodbye to jaemin’s ever-diminishing figure as she walks backwards as best as she can. as she boards her flight, she decides she’s leaving this one-sided puppy love behind in paris.
finally. the seoul philharmonic orchestra is playing the accompaniment for the korean national ballet’s newest project, and today is the day the live musicians come in for a run-through. rumor has it, sua hears from the excitable girls in the corps de ballet, that there’s a new cellist in the orchestra, straight from the paris conservatory and he’s just sooooo dreamy. she laughs and tells them to go through their choreography one last time before rehearsal. when it comes time for the orchestra to arrive, sua’s in front of the pit orchestra with the rest of the artistic board. she sees a tall man walk into the pit with a cello and realizes that this must be the new cellist that the girls were fussing over earlier. something about him strikes her as familiar, and she rises from her seat to walk towards the pit to figure out what it is, and then it hits her. jaemin is back. of course, it all makes sense now that she thinks about it. a young, handsome korean cellist from the conservatoire— how many of those do you see regularly? of course the girls were talking about jaemin. at a loss for words, she walks back to her seat. as the rehearsal progresses, sua can’t focus on the dancers or costumes, but rather, she finds herself thinking about jaemin. and like this, she finds herself getting angrier and angrier. when did he get back? why didn’t he tell her? why had he suddenly stopped contacting her? it’d been five years, damn it! when rehearsal ends, she walks backstage to the orchestra’s green room and leans against one of the violin lockers, arms crossed and eyebrow quirked, unimpressed. “yah, seong jaemin,” she says as he packs up his instrument. “nice to know you’re alive, asshole.” she waits for him to turn around and recognize her, and then she turns on her heel with a huff and leaves.
she doesn’t talk to him for another two weeks.
there’s another rehearsal, and sua’s been trying to decide whether or not she’s going to talk to jaemin. on one hand, she’s still mad at him. on the other hand, she misses him. it’s been five long years without her best friend, and a lot has happened since then. she watches the dancers and the cello section with equal scrutiny, and by the last five minutes of the ballet, she’s already gotten up to get to the green room. when jaemin walks in, she stalks towards him angrily without even waiting for him to put his instrument down. “this is what you get for being a bitch for the last five years. you brought this upon yourself.” on her tiptoes, she reaches up to cup his face with her hands and kisses him quickly. “i’m glad you’re back, jae.”
