petrichor

Daehyun/Youngjae, Daehyun POV

We built a house out of cardboard boxes and torn newspapers. Those that children often put together in rainbow splashes of acrylic paint and glue over the cuticles of their nails, where they craft out vague dreams lingering at the back of their minds. For them, they mould out a universe between the tears of stiff paper and vivid imagination, kaleidoscope of pigmentation chasing scattered colour pencils. For us, we live in black and white, grey blotched over the sides of our sleeves and a part of your lips.

You held the Sunday Times above your head as the rain kept trickling down your shoulder. The printed headlines slipped along your white skin and I fluttered my lashes, watching the words decorate your small frame. It drenched you from head to toe, reports of the monsoon season here to stay and floods down south. Dog-eared paper edges and isolated, cold blooms of black roses. They hid underneath the canopy of their umbrellas as they brushed shoulders with you in a city of smeared windows and typewriter clacks.

I forgot what it was like to love a decade ago. Thunder reverberated by the whisks of cruel autumnal gales and slit through the acute chatter at the overcrowded bus stop. You winced just a tad bit and I my lips, hesitance in my fingers. Squelches of worn-out soles against damp concrete, the nine to five tightness of our collars, your feet sunk into the patter of a downpour. One step, two step, into the puddles where I first lost my breath in the remnants of a summer breeze.

You looked up at me. I blinked and gingerly took away the flimsy cardboard above my head, holding it over yours. I gently tugged your clammy papers from last month and you let go, surprise blossoming lovely mocha in the grey of your eyes. Your fingers clasped onto the wet cardboard, just a shred better than your dripping cover from before, and I raised the papers over my crown. 

Short coughs, shuffle of feet, I fiddled with the seams of my trousers discreetly. There, we waited for the bus together. And there, for the first time, I saw you smile over the many months we had passed by one another—soft, shy and sweet, like the scent of the first drizzle after many dry seasons.