Flutter//Jaehyun

Chapter 3

She crinkles her forehead in confusion and she looks behind me in my room and back into my eyes.

I realize that my room looks like i've had a melancholic night, the usual shit in my room also adds on the look of a depressive bender.

"Are you...okay?" She asks with a quiet tone of voice.

"Yeah, sorry could we do another day? I'm not feeling great lately." I say, slightly guilty for using my mental health as an excuse to hide the random guy in my room, but I was already running with it.

She points behind me.

"Is it because of him?" She says, chuckling.

As I swivel around, I see Jaehyun standing in the middle of my room peering to see who was at the door. He then does a cute wave when I open the door wider with a cheeky smile on his face. And still no fucking shirt on.

As Kiana rushes in to bombard me with questions, I face Jaehyun with annoyance painted on my face.

"Why did you leave the bathroom, idiot." I  hiss at him.

"Idiot? Ouch. I just wanted to see who it was." Jaehyun says with a pout and throwing his shirt on--finally. He then puts on his cheeky smile once again to properly greet Ki.

"I'm Jaehyun. Your friend here needed a nude model, so here I am." he says confidently with a slightly evil smirk on his face. If he were anyone else--waking me up so early and causing a bit disruption to my lonely morning routine--I would feel a bit of anger and frustration building in me. If he were anyone else with deep dimples pushing into his cheeks and a contagious smile--If he were anyone else. But he was strange and intriguing. So instead of brooding, I feel a smile tugging on my lips.

"Liar." I mutter softly but Jaehyun and Kiana were already making jokes about me and getting acquainted. This can't be good.

I sigh and roll my eyes, feeling glad that I would be able to focus my attention on Ki for today and put the ambiguity that is Jaehyun behind me. 

*

So Jaehyun ended up joining Ki and I to run her errands. Kiana is moving some furniture into her new apartment and  needed some help. To which Jaehyun so charmingly responded:

"I'm not doing anything today."

And now, we all sit tightly in Kiana's rented U-Haul, stuck in a gross blockade of traffic and listening to a classical rock radio station. Jaehyun is sat--slightly squished-- between Ki and I and every so often, he taps his right knee to the beat of a song he recognizes. This, of course, annoys me but it mostly has to do with the scorching air giving me a headache and less to do with the knee tapping. With the windows being all the way down--this old U-haul's air-conditioning let out a warm breeze rather than the preferred cold, which was a disgustingly, cruel joke--, the hot air mixed itself with the warmth of humming cars surrounding us, creating a gasoline-sweat cloud hovering around us. But Jaehyun seems to have been comfortable. Aside from tapping his leg, he checks his phone almost every time it buzzes and fidgets with his sweaty hair strands. 

I lean my head against my arm which is propped up against the passenger door. When I can't fall asleep to the sounds of collective road rage and Ki jeering cuss words under her breath, I decide to elbow Jaehyun lightly to get his attention.

He lifts his head from his previous craning position over his phone--his sunglasses pushing gently towards his hairline-- and raises his eyebrows towards me.

"You can still leave if you want." I mutter, leaning my back further into the seat and lifting my feet up to the dashboard. I don't look at him as I say this, though, keeping my vision fixated on the invisible dust cloud errating around the exhaust pipe of the car in front of us-- the exhaust sound hushes like a secret; from afar it is a blurred, sinister whisper and yet the closer you get, the more concealed it is. And like most tired artists, I paint a version of this in my head so I don't have to do it later.