Lovers in Tokyo | taegi

6

6. ACROSS A CROWDED PLACE

____________________________

The five-minute walk had felt like hours.

Yoongi and Taehyung had set out together for dinner, the former dropping off his flowers and changing out of his suit first into something a little more comfortable, which happens to be a yellow hoodie and ripped jeans he'd absent-mindedly packed into his bag that day. Yoongi didn't think too much about his outfit until he'd stepped back out to meet Taehyung again, when the younger had stopped at a standstill, eyes scanning Yoongi up and down, and there seems to be the littlest of movements in his expression, like something giving way.

Yoongi had flushed down to the tips of his toes when he realized he looked similar to when they'd first met six and a half years ago, and he'd almost turned back to change, except he hasn't brought any other clothes.

The sky's still a little light for six thirty, hasn't settled into the deep, vast blue of night time just yet. There's no stars out, but the clouds are hazy and the entire city has a sort of feeling to it, a feeling of being done for the day, haggard business people with relief in their drained faces, friends laughing merrily at an open pub, night stalls starting to open up to let their sweet-smelling scents of taiyaki and takoyaki and other various Japanese street food waft into the air.

As they walk, they talk a bit – and for the most part they're comfortable with each other the way you would with a long-lost acquaintance, but still the lingering silence between the gaps of their conversation rises around them thick and palpable, hanging in the air like the billowing smoke of the hawkers' cooking. There's still that reluctance, that polite superficial air, and they're walking a little too far apart.

Far enough that if someone passes by, they'd think that Yoongi and Taehyung are both separate strangers who happen to be on the same path.

(Which, if Yoongi thinks about it, is kind of true in a sense. Because the two of them don't really know what to say or do or even how to start addressing what had happened between them, so they might as well have started from scratch, anyways; just two strangers with a shared past.)

Yoongi had tried to make small talk, feeling a bit like he's obligated to, the pressure multiplying tenfold and constricting his body. At first he nearly turns around and back out of the whole thing, thinking it a mistake – asking Taehyung to go to dinner, as if they were close friends or something.

The audacity of it all.

But then he sucks in a deep breath, enough for air to skim the bottom of his lungs, enough for him to feel like he'd taken in all the oxygen in the city, and upon exhaling them out, tells himself to stop being so self-conscious, dammit.

So he'd tried to avoid letting the silence stretch too much, asking banal questions as they walk side by side.

How long are you going to be here for, Taehyung-ah?

(Ah...tomorrow morning's my flight, actually. I have to be back by late afternoon in Seoul, and I literally just got here yesterday.)