It's early in the morning on Christmas Eve, and the two of you are wide awake after Taehyung's neighbors a floor below him called the fire department as an early wake-up call for the entire complex. i've always been a light sleeper—Taehyung made sure of that in freshman year—but even he woke up as the fire trucks pulled up to the fire lane next to the apartment building. He came stumbling out of his room in nothing but a t-shirt two sizes too big and sweatpants hanging low on his hips, locks of his hair sticking every which way, face illuminated by the blue, red, and orange lights of the emergency vehicles beneath the window.
And he stayed like that, even as the noise died down and the sun rose. He marched around looking like he had just rolled out of bed, barely sparing himself a second glance in the reflection of his refrigerator.
"Yeah," Taehyung responds like it's obvious. "If we hopped on a bus now we could make it there by nine and spend the day there. How about it?"
"You mean, right now?" i ask, just as clarification. College and its many features have forced you to grow used to spontaneity, but it usually came in the form of "I'm hungry, so I am going to eat an entire bag of Hot Cheetos at this exact moment" or "Yes, my bank account is crying but these pants are very cute," and not, "Do you wanna go to New York?"
"In a bit. Buses leave from here every hour to go to New York, especially since it's the holiday season. Tickets are ten dollars. We could do it, if you'd like," Taehyung says casually, like he's suggesting that the two of you go grocery shopping or something else equally mundane.
"Just for the day?" i ask, a girl of both many questions and a shocked expression.
"Sure," Taehyung says with a shrug, biting into a tomato as if it were a goddamn apple. "We can go to a museum or two, eat a nice lunch or dinner, and go ice skating at Rockefeller. See the tree, too. It'll get us in the holiday spirit, don't you think?"
And normally an outing to New York would have me been planning weeks in advance, organizing reservations and buying tickets for entry into exhibits, but it's winter break and you've got more free time than you know what to do with.
And maybe you'd hate to admit it, but you need someone like Taehyung to get you off of your ass and out of the house, do something fun and spontaneous like college students do in the movies.
Taehyung is practically a movie portrayal of a college student in real life. He's spontaneous, secretive, sage. He's artsy and worldly, paints but is also extremely smart and well-educated. He lives in a quaint off-campus apartment by himself and spends his days making friends and keeping busy. He loves to tease you, and has that sort of lopsided smirk that all casanovas do. And he is, as much as i'd hate to admit it, always been something of a looker. He's got the same sort of handsome, classic look that young European men in paintings from the eighteenth century have, a portrait of them in the prime of their lives. One wink and he'd send every preteen girl in the audience to their knees.
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And you? Well, you suppose you're the tragically unlucky female lead who has to live with him until classes resume.
Taehyung's standing in the kitchen, leaning on the counter island as he scrolls for bus tickets on his phone. "There's a bus leaving from the station in thirty minutes. Think we can make it?"
It might be the fact that i've been holed up in Taehyung's apartment for the past forty-eight hours that makes you say yes. Or it's the desperation to do something, anything, literally anything, to keep yourself busy this break.
Or maybe, just maybe, it's that little voice in the back of my chest, one buried in the depths of your heart, that makes you go. Because there is something so wonderfully exhilarating about being spontaneous. And there is something even more exciting about it being with someone you know.
