strange bedfellows

seven: city of love

There they were, back again. Blinding lights on a massive stage. Clear, melodic voices belting out the chorus of "Hope" with all the emotion in their vocal chords. An ocean of lights, faces and anticipation. Being at the heart of an SMTOWN concert would never get old.

They stood ten meters apart, separated by throngs of people walking around, the watching lenses of the audience, and the unyielding weight of their careers. To the world, they were perhaps distracted by the confetti, exhausted from the four-hour performance, daydreaming into space. In the annals of online history, Jeong Jaehyun and Kang Seulgi were strangers who had never so much as spoken to each other.

So, they remained rooted in their places, deflecting their gazes to everything else but each other. Sometime in the middle, when no one was watching, or at least, when no one knew what they were watching, their eyes met, sharing an uninhibited nanosecond of a glance. She tilted her head, and the corner of his lips upturned to a slight smile.

They blinked, and their time was up. It all dissipated to the cold night air, leaving no traces of all the feelings, affections, moments that once wanted to exist.

//

He had somehow found his way to her, clambering onto the empty velvet seats at the crowded post-concert party, eyes gleaming with a flicker of something that felt like déjà vu.

"How does someone, whose job is to be in the spotlight, enjoy being so far from the action?" he asked, a grin curled along his mouth.

She cast her gaze at the rest of the venue. Half of his groupmates were engaged in an intense game of tequila-pong, Heechul and Taeyeon were letting out their rare tone-deaf voices to the words on the karaoke machine, Wendy and Irene were trying to keep the kids as far away as possible, and the boys had somehow gotten Sehun under a vodka bottle, counting the number of seconds he could stay under it. Seulgi had never been the life of the party, but everyone had an Achilles' heel of some sort, and that perhaps was hers.

"Well, you're here too," Seulgi pointed out.

"Touché," Jaehyun chuckled, clinking his glass against hers.

Seulgi took a sip of the contents, feeling the liquid burn its way down her throat, pooling warmth at the pit of her stomach. They hadn't spoken for more than a week, save for a few perfunctory messages about the weather and if the other was eating and sleeping well. If it was even possible to eat and sleep well in a country twelve hours from home, in the middle of the biggest concert of the season, and being weeks away from online chaos breaking loose.

He slipped his hand into hers. "Hey," he said, turning to her, his eyes soft and wistful, "let's get out of here?"

//

If he thought she would like his idea of playing hooky, running through the City of Love in the dead of the night, then he couldn't be more of a prophet.

Paris was as beautiful as she remembered, more breathtakingly so with the stars hanging in the night sky, soft lights reflecting on the waters of the Seine, and their feet pattering against the cobbled walkways. Everywhere they ran, they seemed to see the Eiffel Tower, with its lighted tip piercing the sky. When they stopped at the Tino Rossi, pairs of tango dancers moved to a lively tune, giving a performance to a crowd drinking red wine directly from the bottles.