a ticket to the sun ∙ myg ✓

5 ↝ seaside curses

She is looking at Yoongi like he is stupid, and he is beyond used to that pinched expression because to be frank, he can ask a lot of stupid questions. There is maple syrup stuck in the corner of her lips, and he bets it would taste better on his tongue from the soft creases there, rather than on the sugary platter that she dines from.

"What kind of dumbass question is that?"

Yoongi shrugs and murders a piece of bacon with the spokes of his fork. The diner is always so quiet at nine in the morning on a Tuesday. It makes her voice echo in his ears. "I was just making sure."

"God, I need to start writing all of your questions down in a notebook so I can announce them in all of their stupidity in my speech at your twenty-first birthday–" Yoongi notices she has become frighteningly confident about the future, these days– "And embarrass you until your cheeks are permanently pink, or until no man or woman alike will ever want you in their pants out of the fear that you may ask them if they really want you to fuck them. Like, are they certain that this is what they want? I mean, they haven't been working you up all this time and answering your 2AM texts about existentialism for nothing–"

"Let's try and make it through my eighteenth first, yeah?" Because that was the question: Are you going to come to my eighteenth birthday party? as if she has not just suffered through the past seven years of her life as his best friend. As if they have not been dreading this day of nonconsensual committal to the death ballot that controls their lives and tears hidden, hopeless love to shreds. Bacon is aggressively chewed. "I will sew up your mouth and burn that notebook before you even get the chance to humiliate me like that."

If that is the case, she hopes the needle is his lips and the thread is his heart.

"Well, if that ain't love, then all the romance stories are wrong," she jeers with a smirk, pancakes creating an almost unpleasant fluff on her tongue. "Nothing like sewing mouths to spice up a sex life."

"You're a pain in my ass."

"I know, you're welcome." She takes a sip of her coffee, the scalding liquid on her tongue much less painful than the consequences. "But to answer your extraordinarily stupid question, yes. Indeed, I will be attending your day of birth celebration. You will officially be in the running to die of unnatural causes, after all."

And she says it just like that. Impending death has been the bane of her entire existence, in the form of the four numbers that marked the year such a catastrophe began. Because when such a matter is thrown in one's face for seventeen years, it is easier to become numb and take the blows like the punches are being thrown beneath water. The doomsday word ceases to make either of them flinch anymore. Now, they volley it between them, never letting it touch the ground because maybe once it is smashed to smithereens against the floorboards in shards of red, it will suddenly be a lot more frightening than they first expected.

Yoongi kicks her shin beneath the table, eyeing her as a grunt is forced out of her lungs. It is only then that she realises he had asked a question, unanswered by her daydream.

"What?"

"I said, what are you going to get for my birthday?"

Maybe a kiss that is beyond overdue, wrapped in the ribbons of six years ago.

She sucks coffee from between her teeth. "A striptease and lap dance enacted by yours truly."

He fake cringes. "God, even thinking about that feels wrong. You're practically my sister."

She almost wants to slam her fists on the table and scream: No I'm fucking not! We're not related at all! We're in love and we're not supposed to be, learn the fucking difference! while Yoongi sits there and cuts his words to pieces with a blade of lies, because such a concept feels beyond far from wrong. He wants her on his lap and underneath his body; he wants to be inside her; a part of her. He wants her more than anything in this godforsaken world.