Role Model | Lee Taeyong

Twenty-Three ☻

|| NARRATOR ||

"I killed the detectives, just like you asked."

"Good job, Jaemin," Narae says. He was quick to notice her irregular behaviour from the moment the words slipped her mouth. Her mind was in a different place.

"Okay, tell me what's wrong. You getting cold feet before your big kill?" He asks, placing a hand over the red-haired girl's shoulder. For once, she left it on, not shrugging it off like her usual conduct.

"No, not that. It's something else." She corrects him. The moonlight of the sky lit the horizon gently as the two teens stared at the night together. His eyes darted towards hers. She was the most beautiful person alive. Her pupils held the galaxy in them and shone like all the stars. She was an imperfection in the human body. She was everything he needed.

Jaemin admits, he fell hard for her, and his hand was painted red. He threw away his entire life for this girl, and he barely regretted it. He would run around the Earth as fast as a light for her, and she didn't even have to do anything back. He hated himself for loving her so much, and he loved her for making him the happiest man alive.

He was a fool, indeed. But only for her. Little did he know that everything he knew was slowly disappearing the moment he took her to the mountain to stare at the ether above that night.

Narae digs something from her pocket, slowly placing it in Jaemin's hands. He carefully tears the letter open, finding not a note like her usual self, but a plane ticket instead.

"What is this?" Jaemin asks, chuckling in disbelief. He didn't take her for a prankster. She never was one, because she was utterly serious and he quickly realizes. "You... Can't be serious, Narae."

"It's not safe for you anymore here." She says simply, not taking no for an answer. Jaemin didn't even want to look down at the plane ticket, it made him nauseous in the guts just thinking about it.

"But you're coming too, right?" He asks faintly, hoping to reassure himself. She refused to look him in the eyes, and that's when Jaemin knew the answer. He never was a crier, but he felt something stuck in the back of his throat and he was almost certain it was torn.

Truth be told, he wasn't ready to let go so quickly. It felt like yesterday when Narae came to him that fateful school day and asked him for help. The memories were slowly vanishing away into the void as he desperately tried to grasp onto them for one last time. It was all shattering down right in front of his own eyes. Every moment, every crush, every kiss, every argument, it was all waning.

He was at a loss for words. "T-This is ridiculous...! What do you plan to do after you kill him, Narae? Hand yourself in, move on to the next person to murder?!" He yells suddenly, his breath jagged and patchy.

"That's the thing, Jaemin..." She finally turns to meet his eyes, and that's when he noticed that she was crying. Softly, beguilingly, irresistibly. Her tears were dripping down from her eyes like how the water slowly fell from the window of the car during spring. Her tears spoke words, poems, masterpieces. Her tears shimmered like the beach on a summer lunch, and pained Jaemin to the bottom of his heart. Lee Narae was crying, and she was beautiful.

"...I'm not going to live." She spoke as light as an angel. His lips formed into a thin line as he places his hands on top of hers. "You don't know that, Narae. You can survive-"

"No, Jaemin. I mean that I'm not going to let myself live."

The silence between the two was erupting. And he knew what he meant, even if he didn't want to believe a single word. And that's when Jaemin knew that everything that they had, was all going to end. Right here, on a grassy hill at midnight while watching the stars. It was perfectly imperfect.

He didn't want to say anything else, so he placed his lips onto hers. His hand slowly placed against the back of her neck, pulling her in closer to his body. He tasted her sweet tears streaming down from her face, and he felt her cotton candy skin begging for more. The world has become quiet around them, so all he cared about was her. But that was how it was always.

It was always going to be her. So he enjoyed the kiss as much as he could. He let himself get carried away, he let himself deeper into her touch. She was the honey he was craving, the medicine he needed. He was a disease and she was the cure. She was the love of his life whether he liked it or not. He didn't care about anything, not about Lee Taeyong and not about the ticket to Taipei City that lays on his lap. And he knew that as soon as he let go from her grasp, she would be gone for good.

So he enjoyed it one last time.