Work Text:
Jumin finds three of Lanie Q’s hairs and picks them up. They’re long and spiraling: one pale brown, one auburn, one white. She hates to see the white ones but he finds them beautiful and not just because they are the same color as Elizabeth the 3rd's fur. He looks forward to the day that all of her hair will be like this, like starlight, as pure as her soul (though she insists otherwise; only because she misunderstands what he means by “pure”).
When he finally met Lanie Q, he was surprised to discover that she was older than him. Her cute little voice on the phone, her giggling at his jokes that no one else got, her jokes in the messenger, her fresh and fun ideas that he could never think of on his own. He had been sure she was younger than him. Even now he feels so much older than her, though not wiser.
In that moment, Jumin had suddenly felt ridiculous. My god, to think of all the times he had talked down to her, offering her advice like an authority figure, like someone with years of experience over her. She should have laughed in his face. He would have, in her shoes, and realizing this just shamed him more. What a child he was, really, especially when it came to relationships.
He immediately recalls crude comments his peers had made about the benefits of dating older women. The thought annoys him but also makes him curious despite himself as to whether or not it was true. But then the very idea makes him think about her having been with other men, and this is one thing he cannot handle. He pushes the thoughts out of his head, though it takes more effort than he would have expected with his years of practice controlling his thoughts and emotions. How much she had shaken him up since he had met her...He feels his face grow hot and adjusts his tie.
In an attempt to regain his composure, he returns his focus to the coiling hairs that catch the sunlight streaming through the floor to ceiling windows of his penthouse. He lays them across the pinstriped leg of his suit and smiles at how they twist up and across the straight subtle lines in the charcoal black fabric. It’s the mirror image of their bodies in the mornings, when he wakes nearly every day to find himself twisted around her like a greedy vine, desperate long legs entwined in her short sturdy ones, a physical embodiment of the pleas he repeats every time he has to leave the penthouse to go to work or on a business trip:
“Don’t leave, please don’t leave...”
She always replies “I won’t, I’ll stay forever” and he knows he should stop begging but the fear once verbalized took on an inertia of its own
An object in motion remains in motion until acted upon by an unbalanced force
and so far he can’t figure out what that could be.