She was where she always was, behind the counter finger the classes with her signature white cloth as a boy that, in no other explanation, took her breath away as he entered. In all her years of seeing strangers of all types and sized, this boy was beyond explicable; he was gorgeous.

He walked like he knew he was gorgeous, but that didn’t wipe the slight blush off her face. His dark hair framed his heart shaped face; coy eyes looked at her knowingly. She coughed into her fist, awaiting his request.

“Gin,” he replied simply, setting his chic black jacket on the empty stool next to him. She poured him his drink as he surveyed the empty bar sneeringly, like hundreds before him.

“Take a picture, it’ll last longer.” He snapped. She straightened up and looked away.

She didn’t look at him again after that; she didn’t want him to yell at her again, so she minded her own business, not that she overly cared; the boy only wanted privacy. She never did like loud customers.

“How the hell does this place stay in business?” he muttered, she looked up at him, blinking quickly. She shrugged and left to her work again, not at all minding the glares of the stranger; he seemed to be in a pretty snippy mood.

She went into the backroom to retrieve some glass cleaner, seeming to have misplaced it for it was nowhere to be found in the cupboard. She looked under the roller tables and shelves, bumping her head on one as she the sudden boom of Ruth Brown’s “Mama He Treats Your Daughter Mean”; Ruth was an especially loud singer, too, which made it all the worse as the banging in her head didn’t stop.

She ran to the front room to find the boy fiddling with jukebox, desperately trying to change tracks, to lower the volume, to do something to make it stop.

She ran to the machine and unplugged it from behind, sighing in relief as her ears relaxed again. She stood up, bumping into the stranger. He was extremely tall, or maybe she was just extremely short. He looked down on her, figuratively and literally. “Your hair is really plain.”

Her hand went to the tips of her locks, fiddling with them before shrugging. “The fact that you’re being chill about this isn’t helping you now!” he shouted suddenly.

She turned around, her eyebrows pinching together. “Don’t look at me like I’m crazy, I’m being serious!” his yells turned to desperate cries as he stomped towards her, she could smell the alcohol ading his breath. “Stop being so unresponsive, or else I can’t be a .”

She slowly stepped behind the counter, kind of afraid of the handsome stranger. “Y-you don’t ing know at all...” he whimpered, rubbing his eyes and falling onto the barstool. “You just don’t ing know how hard it is not ing knowing if I’m gonna have a damn future or not!”

She poured him a slight amount of gin which he downed viciously. “What the do I do?” he stuttered. “What should I ing do? Every girl I’ve been with so far hasn’t given me a ing answer; I’m a ing human being, why can’t people just tell me things straight out!”

So the heartbreaker is the heartbroken, she thought. She sat down herself, across the stranger, trying to search for the words; it was evident before, but have a reminder that the Flower Girl was not at all an articulate speaker, often fumbling with her words therefore convincing herself only to speak when necessary. This stranger needed words, out of all things in the world, he needed words.

“Asking people that love you would be more helpful.”

He looked up, surprised that she had spoken, but more so surprised by her words. He furrowed his brows.

It occurred to her that this was a boy who felt that he needed help from no one; he wandered in his big shoes, spewing hatred and contempt to seem older than the child he was, he was a Romeo to no one’s Juliet but his own ego and now he’s finally hit the bottom of the barrel.

He sniffled, childishly. She caught the words on his school blazer; he was a student, she thought tediously. How many times was this going to happen?

She read his name on the silver tag, slowly, making sure it echoed through her head.

He looked at her, at a loss but then gaining some kind of enlightenment as he placed a bill on the table and got up. As we walked out, he got his phone out of his pocket and dialed.

“Hello? Dad?” he said, quietly and then he was out the door.

Oh Sehun, she thought, grabbing the bill and stuffing it into her apron pocket.