downpour linens

Daehyun/Youngjae, Youngjae POV

It rains in this room. We glimpse at five walls of plaster and peeling paint coats, the one between us a figment of our imagination in a landscape where I hear our deafening heartbeats in the staccato rhythm of the downpour. It taps into my metacarpals like messy footsteps between us of many strangers, where we dare not cross between the sea of faceless else we wind up on the other side, still apart. 

I love you, I whisper, but the pitter patter of copper hearts collapse within anxious linens of cold feet. I keep these words printed against the side of my ribcage where only the melted neon lights (puddles shimmering against concrete city) understand the movement of my chapped lips. You kissed me gently in my reverie last night and I awoke to your dusky silhouette against the mahogany door—perhaps against my back, because we cannot churn out the right words between the cacophony of nervousness. 

Your slippers collect rainwater underneath your cracked soles and I thumb away the streaks of wetness down your dripping hair in my mind. It seems the incandescent sunlight of June has deliquesced into the fringe of your tanned skin, all indented pen and dirt underneath your fingernails. You speak andante but I cannot hear you with the transparency of rain drops so thick underneath the gloom of eleven o'clock clouds. Tap, tap, tap. Amid crimson cheeks and the fibre of your teeth, I knock softly on the air and pray not a soul knows how small you make me feel. My paper white fingers beneath your sun-kissed palm, how we learn again and again how to inhale and exhale only when we are kilometres apart and there is only tin foil night lights to guide us home. I may forget how to breathe by your side but you have made me live in a span of twenty minutes more so than I have in thirty one years.

It is cold. You lent me your jacket yesterday and you would not look away even after I said thank you. You have held me a thousand times in my mind under the ivory sheets, on nights I whimpered and shamefully dug deeper into myself. I pick up your static calls afterwards and you ask sotto voce why I sound as if flowers have bloomed within my lungs. I stammer against stained blankets and peony red, and as our whispers bleed into creaking window grills (seven bristling minutes of the thin breeze eavesdropping), you say you really, really love Spring.

We are both afraid. Trapped in dingy tungsten and one-room apartments, I curl my lashes and dab primrose onto my lips hoping to look prettier in a grimy mirror of lonely twenties while you regret not buying new shoes when your only pair tears before our meeting. You haphazardly tape them and hope I will not know while I worry over my worn-out tresses. The ricochets of currents through the empty corridor have chiselled themselves into my brittle bones and I think of your guttural rasp to remember warm company. We find each other by the train's platform and you have your hair parted in the centre after I told you of my favourite eighties singer, smithereens of retro convertibles and broken dreams ensconced in my soft voice. You look silly but I think I love you even more every time I see you.

It rains in this room. We have six, seven, eight walls whenever we brush fingers and I shakily mark every step I make with a crumbling pillar behind me so I never retreat in embarrassment. Nine and ten when you hesitate for what the world views as uncomfortable, too many seconds and brush the stray strands of hair out my eyes. Eleven, twelve, thirteen till my trimmed nails are so, so close to yours. Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen—seventy, eighty, ninety till I fumble clumsily with the door lock and you gently take the keys from my small hands. I lower my head when I serve instant coffee in a chipped mug from high school (no one ever visits) and you untangle your scarf from your neck.

Ninety one, ninety two, we turn on the frizzing TV between the incessant rain and all I can think of is you. Ninety three, ninety four, you ask for more and I move to grasp the coffee pot only to find your hand is on my thigh. Ninety five, I apologise for the dripping tap that you cannot hear over the unrelenting drizzle and you breathe with your gaze averted that it is okay. 

Ninety six, you hold my hand when the lightning falls apart into the memory of glass shattering. Ninety seven, I can feel your breath against my skin and I know not where to look—the abysmal grey of your irises or the handsome scarlet of your lips. Ninety eight, we kiss and I collapse into winter dust and trembling fingers. Ninety nine, I am against the mattress and you melt sweet asphalt into my sunken bones. One hundred, you are in me and I forget how to breathe all over again.