The Boy From The Bridge - Jakehoon

Chapter 64: Rooftop Rendezvous 5/9

Jake ran for his life, an expression often used figuratively but in that instant, Jake felt like he really was running to save his. 

He had ran immediately down the side of the ice rink and continued his racing down any street he found. 

When he had first bolted for the door he thought his father was going to chase him but it seemed that something had impeded him. Did he trip? Was he knocked over by the door swinging back in his face? Did Sunghoon do something? Suppressing the questions in his head Jake continued to move.

Jake had run a few hundred metres from the Ice Rink and as he began feeling safer he felt the lactic acid rise through his body. As his breathing grew tired and his panting increased he paused, leaning over with his hands on his legs to steady himself. 

'What the hell had just happened?' Jake asked himself. 'Was that a nightmare?' 

'No, it was real.' Jake realised. He really had just being found by his parents. They had tracked him down and they had found him. After all he had been through he was once more on the run.

Jake continued to walk, moving through the crowds of pedestrians. On his walk his mind wondered, on the one hand he was scared and angry that they had found him. After all the pain they had caused him they couldn't just leave him to die in peace? No. Such was their level of control that they felt bound to retrieve their property. 

Turning down another street Jake played the Devil's Advocate and countered that argument. Perhaps he had misread them, or at least his mother. Maybe there was some sincerity in the claim that she loved him, maybe he had gone too far in staging his death and leaving Australia. 

Jake walked down a road until he came across a familiar sight - the bridge on which he had staged his death, the bridge that had taken him across the void from his old life to his new one. Walking towards it, Jake was reminded of that fateful morning, when he had met the man with the big white dog - 'it all changed here' he thought to himself. 

He liked his life here. Disregarding his concerns over Namil and his sexuality for a moment these past few months had been the best of his life. In Jay and Heeseung he had friends who made him laugh everyday. In the likes of Yun he had someone he could talk to about any type of concern. Jungkook had allowed him to be himself, he hadn't tried to model Jake into some kind of manufactured duplicate of himself to live vicariously through. None of those had existed in his previous life.

He had tried new things and had even experienced, albeit briefly, what it was like to accept himself. That had been when he had kissed Sunghoon in the elevator the night they had walked home from Heeseung's grandparents'. That moment would live long in his memory Jake thought as he crossed a road. Carelessness is often used to criticise someone, certainly his parents reprimanded him often as being one such person. However, what he had felt with Sunghoon  was different. Carelessness was the best feeling. Nothing mattered which meant that nothing could stress or burden him. There were no thoughts requiring rational and reason, only existing in the present.  

That weightlessness had allowed Jake to truly experience what is was to be alive - smirking to himself he reminisced that that was probably the happiest moment of his life. Thinking on those things Jake was able to conclude that whatever legitimate plights his mother might be able to produce they did not counter the arguments that he was better off away from them.

Jake stepped onto the bridge, which, while it had a sidewalk - was primarily a bridge for motor vehicles - thus there were no pedestrians walking on it.  Wiping a tear from his eye he thought about the prospect of his parents' arrival taking everything away from him. 

He had had such a lovely time getting to know himself that he realised he now feared that he might forget him when he left. Back in Australia, the idea of even questioning his sexuality had never even being fathomed - now, lurking in the back of his mind were these thoughts - these points of intrigue that Jake had hoped to one day explore.