Taehyung

"Taehyung?" Maya's face twists in shock, but it only lasts for a few seconds after which she bursts out laughing. "Are you trying to hook up with someone for the night?" She speaks as she keeps laughing, and Oh My God! My vocabulary really doesn't contain the words to explain the embarrassment that I am feeling right now.

"Uhm- not exactly," I lower my head, rubbing the back of my neck where I can already feel the heat of the embarrassment.

"But you just asked me if I wanted to give you company for the night," thankfully, she doesn't repeat the second part of what I said, and her voice is more composed now because I guess she is done laughing at me.

How do I disappear?

"I didn't know it was you. I'm so sorry," I apologize meekly, meeting her eyes briefly before diverting them back to the ground and her legs.

STOP STARING AT HER LEGS!

I quickly tear my gaze from her legs and look up at her eyes once again, my own legs suddenly feeling weak and wobbly.

"What are you doing here?" She chuckles softly, uncovering her head from the hood of her zip-up hoodie.

"I- uhm- came to buy these," I show her the toothbrush and the tube of toothpaste that I'm holding in my hand, and she laughs again; the sound of her laughter sounding strangely sweet to my ears.

"Also, trying to get laid," Maya laughs again, covering her mouth with one hand and crinkling her eyes.

She's on a mission to embarrass me tonight. Can my day get any worse?

I remain silent, and then she continues speaking, "You don't even live nearby, and you came all this way for a toothbrush and toothpaste?" She asks me, and I don't know how to respond to that.

Where do I even live? I just walked out of my house.

"Is everything okay?" She asks again, taking a step closer to me when she notices that I haven't yet answered her question.

Her eyes search mine for an answer, and from the look in her eyes, I know that she knows now that something is not okay with me.

"I- I was actually going to stay at a hotel tonight," I confess, making her perfectly arched eyebrows knit together, but she doesn't pry any more.

"My ice-cream is melting, so let's go to my home and talk about this," that was a statement, and not a question.

Before I can protest, she pulls my right hand into hers and begins walking, practically dragging me along.

Without a choice, I walk along with her. After a few steps she releases her hold on my hand, and we walk close beside each other down a dark and narrow alley.

"Do you live nearby?" I turn my head to look at her, trying my best not to stare at her thighs once again.

"Yeah, I live on the next street," she says softly, with her eyes fixed on the path ahead of us.

"You weren't living here before," I comment and side-glance at her, and her eyes find mine, slightly impressed.

"Of course, you know it, bouquet boy," she chuckles, returning her focus to the street ahead.

I laugh softly, stuffing my hands inside the pockets of my sweatpants and letting my head drop, nodding to myself.
"You used to take the red bus to Huam-Dong, and climb up all those stairs carrying your heavy backpack, and then check out yourself in the mirror door at the small hairdressers salon before going home," I knew it, I could embarrass her too.

We're even now.

Taehyung     Maya
        1                1

"If you aren't a detective yet, you should become one. Seriously," Maya laughs, but the blush on her cheeks is unmissable—the same kind that painted her cheeks when I confessed about the rose bouquets and her favorite song the other night.

We don't speak anything after that, the silence between us feeling comfortable though, and the embarrassment that I felt earlier has slowly wilted off as well because she hasn't spoken anything more about it.

I really hope she doesn't bring it up again.

In a few more minutes, we reach a compact house with a beautiful garden in the front. The house and the garden are well-maintained, and the navy blue windows stand out against the stark white walls even in the darkness of the starless, cloudy, full-moon night.

Maya unlocks the front door and holds it open for me with a bright smile, motioning for me to enter first.

"Welcome home," she says sweetly, and it makes a strange warmth spread within me, the sensation manifesting on my lips as a broad smile.

"Thank you," I step in and allow my eyes to take in the interior of her house.

"You have a beautiful house, it feels so warm and cozy in here," I turn to look at her as she takes off her shoes and places them inside the shoe rack.

"Sorry, I forgot," I apologize, removing my slippers and putting them in a corner thereafter.

"Not a problem at all. Make yourself comfortable. I'll put this in the freezer and come back," she refers to the ice-cream and points towards the couch in the living room, and then she walks away into the kitchen.

I sit down on one of the couches and look around the place from where I'm seated. There's a large TV hanging against the cream-colored wall that's facing the couch, a line of oversized windows along the wall on the right and a small contemporary style fireplace along the third wall on the left; the mantelpiece containing just a minimalistic ceramic fragrance diffuser. In fact, the interior of the entire house is minimalistic, yet it feels so comfortable and warm.

"Taehyung, do you want to eat some kimchi fried rice? I cooked earlier," Maya's voice snaps me out of my thoughts, and I turn to look at her standing behind the couch, leaning forward with her elbows resting on the back of the couch.

"Have you eaten?" I answer with a question, and she shakes her head.

"I can give you company for dinner," she laughs, making my face turn red, but I laugh along dismissing it as an inside joke that we would probably talk about even in another birth.

"Let's eat," I get up from the couch, placing my toothbrush and toothpaste along with my wallet and phone on the coffee table and follow her to the kitchen and occupy one of the bar stools at the kitchen island.

Maya serves us a bowl full of fried rice each, along with a simple assortment of accompaniments.

"I'm sorry, I don't have much because I usually eat by myself," she apologizes for the absence of extravagant side dishes.

"Hey, come on. This is a lot. Thank you for feeding me tonight," I smile as I shove a spoonful of the delectable fried rice into my mouth.

She remains quiet over dinner, and I don't really mind because the food is delicious, and I am enjoying every bite of it.

After the meal, we both head to the living room, where she turns on the TV and asks me what I want to watch. I ask her to choose while I lean back on the couch and watch her as she flips through different channels and finally opens Netflix to resume playing a movie that she seems to have been watching earlier.

She leans back on the couch too and stretches her legs out on the coffee table, keeping them crossed at her ankles. The muted soft lighting in her house only seems to be increasing the attractiveness score of her super smooth and perfectly toned thighs and legs.

Sighing, I begin rocking my heels and tapping my feet against the soft carpet beneath to keep myself distracted as I try to focus on the movie.

Maya hasn't asked me any questions about why I was looking for a hotel to spend the night, and in a way I'm thankful that she isn't talking about it because what do I tell her? That I had an argument with my wife and walked out of the house?

Heck! She doesn't even know that I'm married, and that my marriage is a misery.

It is then that my mind goes back to the first time I met her at the reunion after fifteen years, and how I consciously avoided talking about our personal lives, not even asking her about her family life fearing that I might have to face the same questions from her.

What am I trying to achieve by not revealing the fact that I'm married and that my marriage is troubled? I'd probably not tell her anything unless she herself asks me about it.

But what if she has already made up an opinion about me in her mind given that I was looking to hook-up earlier?

That'd be embarrassing.

Taehyung, you have already embarrassed yourself enough tonight. So this shouldn't be much.

Puffing out a breath, I run a hand through my hair and return my gaze to the movie. It is an unfamiliar English romance movie, and it seems to be quite an old one because I can't even identify the actors.

My mind keeps thinking what to do next, and what to talk to her, and where I would be staying tonight, and numerous other thoughts keep crowding my mind.

The scene on TV suddenly turns a bit racy with an intense make-out between the actors, and I suddenly start feeling like an awkward, hormonal teenager. My eyes are having a hard time staying in one place although they want to stay riveted onto the screen, and I even contemplate telling Maya to switch to something else.

Shut up, Taehyung. Shouldn't you handle this like an adult? How can a thirty-three-year-old married man get turned on by watching two people acting out a make-out session in front of a camera?

But when I literally haven't had any sexual activity in more than two years, this is quite hard for me to handle.

I begin chewing the corners of my lips when the screen is filled with mouths, fingers, flying clothes, and a lot of skin, and the sounds are turning into erotic moans as well, and, thankfully, that's when Maya pauses the movie.

But I also feel a little disappointed because I was curious to see what happened next, not that it would be anything that I haven't seen or experienced, yet the excitement is always there within.

Your thoughts?

Published on : 04/26/2022