Kim Jongin doesn’t want to do anything on the first day of summer. But if there was anything that he did want to do, being rudely awoken at 8:00 in the morning was not it.

His general idea had been sleeping way past noon, eating his way through their (somewhat pitiful) stash of junk and sweets, vegetating in front of his TV for a few good hours before endless surfing the interest into the wee hours of the morning. Overall, a pretty solid itinerary. But he can’t say being violently shaken by his crazy mother had been part of the plan.

“Kim Jongin!”

She’s yelling so loud, he knows the neighbors are going to complain. They complained when the old ahjushhi down the hall made too much noise when he fell. They didn’t even care that the guy broke a hip.

“Go away,” Kai mumbles into his pillow. He’s normally not this disrespectful to his mother, but he only fell asleep a few hours ago and her shoves are getting progressively more and more painful, something his still sleeping brain can’t really handle.

The assault on his body suddenly stops and Kai hears his mother walk away. Less than ten seconds later he’s asleep again, only to be startled awake again by an assault of a different kind.

“Jesus Christ!” He shouts as he literally shoots up out of bed as a pure rush of ice hits his body. He pushes his bangs, which are now plastered to his forehead, out of his way as he sends a look towards his mother. The petite woman is holding an empty glass, where only a few drops of water remain. The rest of it is on Kai now, the entire top half of his body drenched.

“You don’t tell your mother to ‘go away’, Kim Jongin,” she starts and Kai has to resist the urge to roll his eyes because here comes the lecture. He’s still tired as hell; he really can’t deal with another one of her rants. His mom is pretty okay, most of the time. She only gets like this when she’s stressed, which is recently becoming more often than not. Kai doesn’t like to bug her when she gets like this. He’s perfectly fine with just staying out of her way. Out of sight, out of mind and all that good .

“—came this morning and so I’ve decided you need to pull your weight around here.”

“Eh?” Kai halts in rubbing the sleep from his eyes and blinks up at his mom. “Pull my weight?”

“Yes,” she huffs, blowing away the flyaway hairs that are already coming unraveled from her bun. “A job. You need to get a job.”

“W-what?” He stutters, like his mom just gave him heartbreaking news. Which she did. Technically.

“You’re eating me out of house and home,” his mother sighs. “And the electric bill is through the roof. I told you, I got a warning notice this morning. Something has to change around here Jongin. I’m already doing all I can.”

Kai tries to let her words sink into his hazy brain. Warning notices are nothing new to them. Kai actually can’t remember a time when some company or another hadn’t been threatening to shut off some utility of theirs. His mom just always had it under control. Or apparently, that’s what she had wanted him to think. The tiredness behind her eyes makes him wonder if maybe it’s always been just as hard as it is right now, and it’s just getting harder for her to cover it up.

“I’ll… I’ll look, okay?” He relents, still running a hand over his face in a futile attempt to wake himself up. He wants nothing more than to just flop back over into bed and sleep for about twelve more hours, but it’s like his mom’s plea has put things into a different perspective. He can see the bags under her eyes now. How her dull grey nurse’s uniform hangs from her tiny body.  How her wrists look like they might snap as she pulls out her phone when it starts to ring.

She starts speaking rapidly to whoever it is on the other side of the line, and by the sounds of things, something important has just happened. She leaves his room without another glace and Kai watches her go.

A job. It’s going to , he knows that already. He’s never been one to take kindly to other people telling him what to do. He starts running possibilities through his brain, like what he can do that will require the least amount of effort.

But… he’s got to help his mom. He’s all she has. She’s all he has.

His dad’s been gone for as long as he can remember. Not that he really ever cared or anything. He’s always gone through life sort of apathetic to every thing going on around him.  As long as his mom was okay, he was okay.

Only now it’s kind of apparent that she’s not okay.

He sifts through the pile of clothes in his corner haphazardly and pulls out the first decent pair of jeans he can find. He grabs a random shirt too before sluggishly making his way to the kitchen.

His mom must have just left. He can still smell the remnants of  her flowery perfume lingering in the small space. Really, her presence is the only thing that can liven up their dingy little apartment. Everything is cracked and broken and just old, and the little pots of flowers that his mom puts around the room are the only real source of life in the entire place.

Except now they’re dying too.

He starts rummaging for food, because if he’s being forced to do this, there’s no way in hell he’s going to do it on an empty stomach. He nibbles on a few random pieces of fruit, because everything else in in the cabinet aka, too far for him to walk. On his way out the door, a piece of paper stuck to the otherwise blank refrigerator catches his eye.

It’s the notice, he realizes. He’s never really looked at any of them. It has intimidating words and a threatening tone and at the bottom is supposedly the amount they owe. The one that they only have a few days to pay.

Kai feels his stomach drop.

He shoves one last strawberry in his mouth before he marches out the door, his head filled with a newfound determination. The feeling of being determined to do anything is a new one for him.

However, as soon as it comes, it’s gone, because Kai tries every reasonable place within a three-mile radius of his house. He starts off with a smile, but after about the fifth time of being rejected, it’s quickly replaced by a scowl. And they’re all saying the same thing.

‘Not hiring.’

How the hell was he supposed to know that all the damn college kids applied for all the jobs weeks ago? He never got the memo that that was how it worked.

“God dammit!” He yells, kicking the nearest thing in his vicinity, which just so happens to be a metal trashcan. The faded canvas of his sneakers to nothing to soften the blow and it only ends up making him ever more frustrated as he hops around on one foot like an idiot.

By now, it’s been a while since he left home, and the midday sun is beating down on his back harder than ever. He’s absolutely covered in sweat. So bad, that he thinks some of those places might have turned him away just because he was so disgusting.  He wants to go home. To his nice, air conditioned (for now) room and sleep the rest of the day away and forget any of this ever happened.

But then he thinks of his mom and her sad, tired eyes and the notice from the electric company and sighs.

It’s inevitable. He’s going to have to get a job, sooner rather than later.

Just… not today.

Resigned, fed up, and just overall ing tired, he begins the long trek back home. He knows his mom won’t react well to the fact that he’s coming out unsuccessful, still jobless, but he figures if he tells her that he got straight up rejected by thirty odd businesses in a row, she might go easy on him. Maybe.

He misses his skateboard. Chanyeol broke it a few weeks back (snapped it right in half) and now he doesn’t have any way to get a new one. And he knows that not-so-little er isn’t going to pay for it.

As he walks, he does everything he can to cool himself down, which isn’t much.  He peels his shirt away from his sticky skin and shakes it a few times. He doesn’t miss the looks from the girls as they walk by, their eyes trained on his sort-of-there but could-be-better abs.

Maybe he could sell his body for money. The thought passes through his mind but he immediately lets it go with a scoff. Yeah ing right. He’s not gonna let some lonely, middle aged lady all up in his business just for a few bucks.

It takes him a while, but he finally reaches his neighborhood. As he turns the corner, his apartment comes into view, and if he weren’t dying of heat , he’d do a happy dance or something. But he won’t.

His happiness is short lived though when a sharp pain hits his gut, nearly making him double over.

“Gah,” he grunts, clutching his stomach as it roars loudly. A quick look at his phone tells him he’s been at this for a little over six hours. Six. Hours. Without Food. For someone who usually eats every hour on the hour… that’s a ing lifetime.

He hastily digs his hands into his pockets, mentally rejoicing when he finds some crumpled money in the bottom. There’s not many places to buy food around his apartment, and he’ll let hell freeze over before he walks another mile, so he starts making his way across the street to Jung’s, the corner market where apparently, ice cream is so cheap it’s almost ridiculous. It’s a little out of his way, but he doesn’t care. It’s better than walking back into town. Plus,cheap ice cream. That’s all he wants.

The bell rings to signal his arrival, but no one even pays it any attention. Jung’s has never been the most popular place. It’s old and the stark white walls and halogen lights make it look sort of like a mental institution. Kai has a ton of discount coupons from when he dated Krystal, who’s father so happened to be the owner of the fine establishment. But he can’t bring himself to even use them because Jung’s is that lame. Not to mention the fact that there’s always a possibility he could run into his ex-girlfriend, and that is just not happening. However, their ice cream is almost free so maybe it’s not all bad.

He makes his way to the little ice cream cooler in the corner. As soon as he reaches it, he understands why it’s so cheap because there’s like two lone popsicles in the case and that’s it.

That’s it.

He picks up one of the popsicles dejectedly (he thinks it’s grape, but he can’t really be entirely sure). His stomach grumbles once again as he glances up and around the small store for something else he could eat that was also relatively inexpensive. But then he sees something that makes him momentarily forget about his hunger. And not just anything can make Kim Jongin forget about food.

Im Yoona, pretty much the most perfect girl Kai has ever laid eyes on, is standing a few feet away from him. She’s sweeping the floor with an old looking broom and Kai recognizes the ugly white uniform shirt with the Jung’s logo on it.

He takes a deep breath and clears his throat. “Hey, Yoona,” he says, sort of sheepishly because Im Yoona is beautiful and even though he’s known as the “cool and quiet kid”, he can never seem to keep his cool around her. She’s a friend of a friend of a friend (his ex-girlfriend’s sister’s best friend, to be exact), so they sort of know each other. But then again, they sort of don’t.

“Oh,” Yoona looks up from her mindless sweeping and Kai feels a small flutter of satisfaction go through him at the way she looks pleasantly surprised to see him. He figures she’s just glad for a distraction, but he lets himself dream anyways. “Hey, Kai.”

“Hey, I, uhm…” he starts nervously, clutching his rapidly melting popsicle even harder in his hands. “I didn’t know you worked here.”

“Yeah,” Yoona sighs, leaning on her broom. Before today, Kai has probably spoken five words to the girl, but here they are having a conversation and oh, he’s really sweaty and probably looks disgusting and why couldn’t he have gone home and at least changed his shirt first? “I work here every summer. Jessica’s parents own the place, so…”

“Do you, well… are you hiring?”

Kai doesn’t even know why he asks. It’s not like he actually wants to work at Jung’s. This place blows and he knows between the bad oldies music and the group of old ladies scribbling away at countless lottery tickets at the front counter, he’d go crazy within a day. An hour, probably.

So he’s relieved when Yoona shakes her head. “No,” she sighs. “We’re only allowed to have six people working here because Jung doesn’t want to pay for anyone else. It’s stupid, right?”

“Yeah,” Kai says distractedly. And just like it takes a lot to distract him from food, it takes even more to distract him from Im Yoona. There’s only one thing that can do it, really.

Old ladies fighting.

Obviously, something has happened amongst the ahjummas at the counter because they’re all yelling and one of them is even smacking another with her really heavy looking bag. The small girl behind the counter has a scary look on her face and Kai can only watch as she slams her hands down on the counter.

“I’ve had it with this !” She yells, but the ladies don’t stop squabbling. The girl runs out from behind the counter, pushing her way through to the door.

“Taeyeon?” Yoona calls out worriedly. The girl turns towards them with a crazed look on her face.

“I can’t take it anymore!” She wails. “You can tell Jung I quit! I hate this place! I hate those stupid ahjummas! And I really hate this shirt!” Taeyeon grabs her white polo shirt and starts clawing at the Jung’s logo in a futile attempt to rip it off. Kai has to take a step back because he’s really not sure she’s in the right state of mind. Once she figures out that she’s not going to be able to take the logo off by her own hands, her arms drop to her side. Her face crumples and she runs from the building crying.

“Oh, my god,” Yoona mutters, looking as surprised as Kai feels.

Not long after, a boy runs into the store. He’s wearing the same shirt that everyone else is, that starched white polo that is apparently a trigger for mental breakdowns, meaning he’s an employee. Kai takes in his messy hair, skinny stature and his humongous eyes and can’t help but think he’s seen him before. But if he can’t place a name to his face right away then he figures he probably doesn’t care.

“What’s going on?” The guys asks Yoona, his eyes looking like they might bust out of his sockets any minute. “I was taking the trash out and Taeyeon noona suddenly runs past with her shirt half way over her head.”

“Oh, my god,” Yoona says again. Kai feels really overwhelmed. The ahjummas aren’t yelling anymore but they’re still squabbling. There’s a really terrible R&B song playing over the speaker and this bug-eyed guy is looking at him and if he’s being honest, it’s kind of creeping him out. All he wanted was ice cream.

So as he makes his way home about fifteen minutes later, he's still not really sure how he ended up with an entirely melted popsicle, an empty stomach, and an interview with Mr. Jung himself tomorrow morning.

haha surprise!! ><

ok so this is really to make up for that awful terrible 'awkward' update because it was boring. i know its boring. and i know you guys know its boring. and i lost so many subs omg. :/

BUT IM OVER IT NOW.

so yes. kaisoo. yay! i've been so excited about this. otp and kai and donut omg yes. i just love them.

thank you to E V E R Y O N E who subscribed~~ like i said on the 'awkward' update... i'll get around to replying. don't think i'm ignoring you. please. ><

nothing really to say. except for omg look at kai:

(omgi'msoobsessedwithhimrightnowsorryyixingbutomg)

here's my tumblr~ talk to me! plus... i usually make an idiot out of myself so that's always fun. 

<3

~Ari