Chapter 5

They were on a car, his father’s car. Jun was sitting on the backseat alone. His father was driving, and his mother was on the passenger seat. They were arguing. Again. Jun really couldn’t understand why his parents kept fighting all the time. He didn’t really know what they were arguing about; it was mostly complicated stuff, too complicated for his seven year old mind to deal with.

He hated it when his parents argued. It was really distressing to witness your parents fought with each other on every other occasion. He hated it most when they fought over dinner. Most times Jun would just silently stare at his plate trying to be invisible while his mother had a screaming match against his father, his appetite completely gone. One time his mother threw a spoon across the table to his father’s direction but his mother’s aim was bad so the spoon had hit Jun instead. He had a small scar on his chin under his lower lip ever since.

Jun tried to get himself occupied with his mini transformers toys and tuned out his parents’ voices. Holding Optimus Prime on one hand and Bumblebee on the other, Jun made some low rumbling noise and pretended that the two transformers were flying. Then the car jerked and Jun accidentally dropped Bumblebee.

“What are you doing?! Mind the road!” his mother shrieked.

“It’d be easier if you didn’t keep screaming your head off!” his father shouted back.

Jun lowered himself to pick Bumblebee up. But he couldn’t reach it with his hand so Jun crawled behind the passenger seat to get his toy. Then there was another jerk followed by a screeching noise and the last thing Jun remembered before everything went black was the sound of his mother screaming.

Jun woke up to the sight of the house on fire and his mother smiling down at him. He stared horrified between the fire dancing at the furniture and his mother’s smiling face.

“Jun, we’re going to follow Dad, okay?” she said sweetly. “We are family. Family should stick together.”

Jun opened his eyes and gasped for breath, chest frantically falling and rising almost in tune with the rapid thumping of the heart in his ribcage. He stared unseeingly at the darkness surrounding his room, his limbs heavy and felt more like some alien weight attached to his existence that he didn’t quite know how to take control over rather than parts of himself. With all the energy he could muster he pulled his arm up to cover his stinging eyes. The tears still trickled from the corners of his eyes despite the pressure. Jun let them roll down the sides of his face.

Jun let out a shuddered breath as he recalled what had happened next. This wasn’t the first time he had dreamt about the car crash that had taken away his father’s life. But this was the first time that the dream overlapped with that particular memory. Something squeezed his chest as Jun replayed the sound of his mother’s coaxing voice in his head. For once she hadn’t been angry at him. She had taken Jun into her arms and ran her hands through his hair, whispering soothing words as Jun panicked at the sight of the fire slowly crawling closer to his bed, saying it would be alright, it wouldn’t hurt at all, and they would be reunited with his father before he knew it. But instead of savoring the rare moment of his mother holding him tenderly rather than hitting him with the closest thing at hand or shouting at him to leave her alone, he had cried for help and struggled to get away from his mother’s embrace.

He had woken up in a hospital bed with a few broken bones. His mother’s body (or what was left of it) was found among the burned ruins of the house. He still remembered the anguished expression on his mother’s face just before he jumped out of his bedroom’s balcony.

Jun had silently promised he would go after his mom and dad, because his mother was right – family was supposed to stick together. He just thought that being burned was a really painful way to die.

Jun thought, as he looked up to Taeyong awkwardly smiling down at him while taking off his jacket (it’s red this time, and looked really good on him), that this kind of cliché accidental train meeting was exactly that, cliché. And wasn’t supposed to happen at all. Jun had decided that the afternoon at the coffee house would be his last meeting with Taeyong. He shouldn’t be adding a new name to his ‘people I’d miss’ list. The list was already long as it was.

It seemed though, that the universe held a grudge against him. Or something like that. Because now he was seeing Taeyong for the third time, on the train back to the city. And they were seat mates, again. Jun cracked a smile at Taeyong who had sat himself down quite comfortably next to him and thought that if this was fate then fate was a nasty and vindictive entity.

“Are you actually my stalker? I keep seeing you around,” said Taeyong. His tone was serious, but Jun noticed the humor in his unfairly pretty eyes.

He pouted.

“Please, Hyung. I’m starting to think that you are my stalker. You left your student ID in the cardigan pocket on purpose, didn’t you?”

Taeyong cocked one elegant eyebrow at Jun’s mock accusation. “Nice delusion you’ve got there. But it’s exactly that, a delusion. I don’t do stalking. I politely ask the people I like out like a civilized human being.”

“Did you just say you like me, Hyung?” Jun asked cheekily despite this weird escalating his heart beat suddenly got into.

Jun was a little surprised that Taeyong actually stared at him with a frown after hearing Jun’s teasing remark.

Jun forced out a laugh and prayed for it to not sound unnatural. “I was only joking, Hyung,” he said.

“Huh.”

“Please don’t look at me like that. It’s kind of scary.”

Taeyong sighed and lifted a hand to rub off the crease on his forehead.

“Sorry,” he said. “My friends have been telling me to control my expression. They said I look angry all the time. But I’m not, really. It’s just –“

“The eyebrows,” Jun cut in, then grinned. “Your eyebrows remind me of angry birds. And your mouth looks like it was set on a frown by default.”

“Thank you for pointing that out,” Taeyong said flatly. “Definitely boosts up my self-confidence, really.”

Jun couldn’t help it, he laughed out loud at Taeyong’s face. When he managed to control his laughter, however, he noticed that Taeyong actually had a small smile on his face.

Jun figured maybe it was alright if Taeyong made it to the list after all. Jun would miss a lot of people, adding one more wouldn’t be all that bad. At least that was what he thought at the moment, he might change his mind later. Besides, he wasn’t even sure it was possible to miss anyone after you died.

Jun had fallen asleep on Taeyong’s shoulder again.

They had been talking for a while as the train left the station. Then Jun had started yawning and that was when Taeyong noticed that the younger man looked tired, if not exhausted. There were dark circles under his eyes and now that Taeyong saw them, the eye bags were hard to miss. He had looked a little pale the other day too. Taeyong wondered why this boy always looked exhausted and sleep deprived every time they met.

Too deep into his musing, Taeyong belatedly realized that Jun had stopped talking and had fallen asleep next to him. He stared at Jun’s endearingly serene sleeping face for a while before shaking his head, feeling a little silly. He took out his novel and started reading. When he felt something heavy dropped onto his left shoulder, Taeyong only smiled and tried not to move too much.

Half an hour before they reached the city train station, Taeyong felt Jun moving. He closed his book and put it down to his lap, turning his head to see Jun rubbing the sleep off his eyes.

“I’m sorry. I don’t know why I keep falling asleep on you,” said Jun, voice a little rough from sleep.

“It’s nice to know that you find my bony shoulder a comfortable pillow,” he replied teasingly.

Jun smiled widely at Taeyong and Taeyong noticed that his eyes went mismatched when he did that.

“It’s going to sound weird, but I sleep better on your shoulder than in my own bed, Hyung,” Jun said.

Taeyong couldn’t help the raised eyebrows this time. “That is indeed weird.”

Jun ducked his head in embarrassment. “I know. I probably shouldn’t have told you that.”

Instead of feeling weird, though, Taeyong felt oddly pleased. But he didn’t say it out loud because that, he thought, would definitely sound even weirder.

They walked out of the station side by side after getting off the train. Taeyong felt oddly reluctant to part ways with Jun and before he could think it twice blurted out if Jun would like to grab some food with him. It was almost lunch hour after all.

“Um.” Jun appeared to contemplate for a while before nodding. “Sure. What do you have in mind, Hyung?”

“There’s this new café I’ve been meaning to try for a while. I heard the food is good. It’s close by, we can walk there,” said Taeyong.

“Okay. Let’s go then.”

Taeyong eyed Jun as he fell into step next to Taeyong on their way to the café, looking somewhat resigned.

“You don’t have to come if you don’t want to, you know. It’s alright.”

Jun stopped mid-step and looked at him wide eyed. The boy shook his head vigorously, his hair bouncing comically from the all the movements. “No, Hyung! I want to. Really. You’re good company.”

“Well, it’s good to know.”

Jun grinned at him, and his right eye became a lot smaller that he looked like he was winking at Taeyong. The mismatched eyes looked a little creepy in an endearing kind of way, though Taeyong wouldn’t be able to explain that in a more sensible term. It was good to know no one would oblige him to, as long as he remembered not to mention it to anyone, especially to Jisoo.

“And I know you need to bask on my glorious presence for a little longer to get you through the rest of the day.”

Taeyong shook his head at that. “I am appalled at the size of your ego.”

Jun’s grin didn’t waver at all. “There are a lot of worse things to be appalled at.”

As Taeyong felt the corners of his lips twitched into a smile, he silently noted that Jun actually got a point.

It was ridiculous how fast he was falling. He had only met Jun three times, and this wasn’t even a date. But he loved the way Jun scrunched his nose and the way his eye twitched and the easy grin the younger offered on every occasion. He found it pleasantly funny how Jun tended to blurt out the weirdest things and how easily he got over his embarrassment after that. And Jun had said Taeyong’s shoulder was comfortable to sleep on. Taeyong didn’t know he would find the fact appealing. No one had ever really fallen asleep with their head on his shoulder before. Everyone had always been a little too intimidated by Taeyong to dare resting their head on any of his body parts, except maybe Jisoo but Jisoo didn’t count. Well, there was Taemin but pseudo little brothers didn’t count either.

Taeyong knew he should probably be horrified over this but oddly enough he wasn’t. He was more worried however, over the way Jun after a few mouthfuls seemed to grimace on every swallow of the seafood fried rice they were having.

“Is the food that bad? You’re eating like you were being tortured,” Taeyong pointed out eventually.

Jun looked up at him, fork hovering between the plate and his mouth. He looked strangely distressed.

“I’m sorry.”

“What for? Did you do something wrong?”

“No. I mean – the food isn’t bad at all.”

“I know. I’m having the same thing, see.” Just to show his point Taeyong brought up another forkful of fried rice from his plate and shoved it into his mouth. He held his gaze with Jun as he chewed, it was actually quite good.

Jun put his fork down and broke their eye contact by ducking his head.

“I’m just feeling full,” he said.

But Jun hadn’t even eaten half of his food and Taeyong hadn’t seen him eating anything on the train. He couldn’t be feeling full already. When Taeyong pointed that out, Jun shook his head, saying he really was feeling full.

“I don’t eat much,” the younger said.

Well, that was an understatement, Taeyong thought as he eyed Jun’s dish. But he decided to keep his sentiment to himself.

Jun looked at his dish ruefully as they prepared to leave a few minutes later.

“You can have the waiter put it in a takeout box if you want,” Taeyong suggested. “You can eat it later when you feel hungry.”

“I probably should,” Jun said in agreement.

Jun had a plastic bag with a takeout box containing his uneaten food as they both walked out of the café. Taeyong had totally intended to cover the bill since he was the one who asked in the first place but Jun insisted that they split it, taking out his debit card to pay for his share and handing it to the waiter in addition to Taeyong’s despite Taeyong’s persistence. “You can pay when you take me to a fancy restaurant next time, Hyung,” Jun said cheekily at the look Taeyong was giving him after the waiter left with their cards.

Taeyong was fairly sure that he was not just imagining that Jun did mean he wanted to there be a next time. By the time they parted ways Taeyong had Jun’s number stored in his phone contact list and a promise to call him later. Taeyong supposed this could turn out well, whatever this was.

***Download NovelToon to enjoy a better reading experience!***