smoke gets in your eyes
smoke gets in your eyes
~ 2,050 w, pg, (jessica-centric/donghae)
donghae’s a solar system, he's her sun, and now that he doesn’t love her anymore, she’s stuck revolving around him.
■ companion fic to the ballad of a fool (set in the same era etc.), referring to the line "that’s what my sis told me and I’m here while she’s still at home, baking potato cakes."
■ this obvly has a soundtrack, look at the end of the post
■ no, I can't write fluff or anything happy
6:00 PM
“The salad needs more dressing.”
The maid nods like she’s been doing all day, yes and runs to the cabinet for balsamic.
“And put some honey in there.”
Jessica stands behind the kitchen counter with her hand on her hip and a cigarette held to her lips, staring down at the three children. There are only four things you need in parenthood, so she has learned, a warning look - for Jihye for playing with her food, an annoyed glance - for Daniel’s airplane noise and a forced smile - for Mi Kyong’s good table manners.
The chapter on husbands goes something like this - an angry frown for when he comes home late but what mother forgot about was what to do when he doesn’t come home at all.
6:30 PM
The actress emerges from the bus with light steps, like she’s floating, and a gust of wind blows golden ringlets back off her shoulders. A bright smile is already widening on her face. She spots her football superstar’s boyfriend and run into his open arms, they embrace then she presses a kiss to his cheek.
“That’s just like you and daddy!” Jihye says, stars in her eyes as she points at the screen.
Sometimes Jessica blames the film industry for her failures. They put a passionate kiss in between the climax and the credit, hinting a happy ending to an audience of naïve, teenage girls and they all think the same thing, look that girl’s me! She was one of them too, all fresh faced with hopes and dreams that disappears with youth and replaced with marriage.
That’s why they don’t make movies about what happens after wedding bells and big white gowns; it’s too tragic to enter the romance category.
Jessica sighs. “That’s enough TV for today,” she says and puts her hand out, demanding for the
remote, “Go to your room”
The seven years old girl nod frowns and mumbles, okay, and then up the stairs she goes.
She goes for the scotch and drinks down her sorrows.
7:00 PM
She leans into the phone, caught between her ear and her shoulder.
“Hello?”
It’s not Donghae, it never is.
“This is Jessica,” she begins, feigning a sickly sweet voice, “Donghae’s wife,” Jessica adds a beat later, “Is he still at the office by any chance?”
“Oh hey, Jessica,” a husky voice responds almost too quickly, “It’s me - Kris, I was at that dinner gathering from two week ago.”
An image of a boy with slicked back blonde hair with charcoal eyes and a messy black tie comes back to her in a flash. She remembers Donghae introducing him to her as the new addition to the partners with a hint of irritation in his tone.
“Yes, of course,” she smiles a little, “How could I forget? You were singing praises about my potato cakes.”
“I heard it’s a popular dish, now I could finally see why,” he chuckles on the other side of the line.
“About Donghae,” there’s a pause and Jessica thinks she already knows the answer, “He left early
today, around five.”
She doesn’t say anything.
‘Hello? , ‘Hello?’, she hears and ignores.
He hangs up. She blinks hazily at the telephone for a moment but the verdicts out and it’s not what
she wants to hear but what she expects to hear.
Jessica wonders why she’s still surprised after all this time.
7:30 PM
She sits on the chair she picked, drums her finger against the oak table he carved, use the edge of the ashtray her mother in law bought to stub out her cigarette.
All of this takes place under the roof of a house Jessica chose - a little white house in Gangnam with a fence and a rose garden, Jessica was eight months pregnant with Da Eun and wanted their daughter to be born and raised in a house, not a two bedroom apartment in the midst of city’s pollution.
Donghae designed the baby’s room - cotton candy pink walls with white clouds and little butterflies. He came home with the cot and finds her lying at the end of the staircase, bleeding.
They baby died and she thinks, so did his love for her.
He painted the room black, the only one in the white house. It turns into his working space. Donghae doesn’t bother to lock the door for privacy; he doesn’t need to, the memories are too much for her to take.
Every now and then, she thinks about the baby-that-wasn’t and how it could have fixed everything that was ever wrong between them. That little girl could have been their rock - the thing that holds them together instead of creating a gaping hole between them.
And just like that Jessica’s dream house transformed into her worst nightmare.
8:00 PM
It starts raining.
Everything outside the window is grey and splattered. The steady tapping sound fills the room, drowning out the faint hum of chatter from the television. There's lighting, Mi Kyong’s horrified shrieks blend in with the weather condition and Jessica pretends she doesn’t hear.
She takes off her ring and starts to cry into still-smooth hands, nail polish matched to her lipstick like always.
The thunder stops and she does too, wiping away her tears with her forefinger and standing up in just a second and with the usual grace in her steps, she begins to walk in the direction of the kitchen.
There’s a plate of his dinner, untouched, roast beef.
Jessica leaves it in the oven; Donghae will be back by nine, she’s sure of it.
(It’s nine and she’s still alone in the darkness.)
9:15 PM
Daniel tip toes down the stairs and into the living room. He looks like Donghae with his doe eyes and faded brown hair, Jessica wants to scream at him.
“What are you doing out of bed?”
He looks up at her, a wide smile as she offers her a story book he picked a week ago. “Daddy still needs to read me my bed time story.”
“Go back to bed.”
“But da -“
“Daddy can read you the book some other time,” She holds the flicker of the lighter against the tip of a new cigarette, “Now get some sleep, you have school tomorrow.”
“No!” the boy screams, falling to the floor and flailing his arms up and around in a manner that frightens her, “No, no, no, I want daddy! Where’s daddy?”
His question is like an unsolvable crossword puzzle with no right answer. She doesn’t know how to answer her son’s question correctly - it’s not a definite ‘yes’ or ‘no’ because she doesn’t know where Donghae is or when he’s coming back, if he’s coming back. Her heart sinks at this and she thinks she should have known better.
“I said,” Jessica’s yelling now, flushed in the face with frustration shines clear in her eyes, “Go. Back. To. Bed.”
Daniel wails all the way back to his room, tripping over the carpet multiple of time until Ji Hye comes to his rescue, wrapping her tiny hand around his as she leads him back to his room.
“Just like your father!"
She screams and Daniel doesn’t hear it, just like Donghae.
10:00 PM
She digs out their wedding tape. What for, she doesn’t know, reliving the past won’t change the present.
She goes through high school with certain expectations and those expectations included a doe-eyed, crooked smile someone who would hold her heart in his hands and say he loved her, loved every single part of her, bad or good, through sickness or health.
Those expectations belonged in their vows, together ‘till they part.
Jessica likes to thinks that boy from high school wasn’t Donghae but someone else - a teenage
dreams that stayed only a pleasant memory and didn’t turn into an unpleasant reality.
Donghae’s a solar system, he's her sun, and now that he doesn’t love her anymore, she’s stuck revolving around him.
10:30 PM
The thing is, Jessica plays housewife growing up, wearing red lipstick, making cucumber sandwiches for her dolls, asking unanswered questions about their day while drinking tea out of plastic cups.
Not her sister.
Krystal’s all punk rock t-shirts, ripped jeans, applying a bit too much eyeliner with Beach Boys playing loudly in the background.
Their mother scolded, complained, went on about this or that as Krystal runs in and out of the house at four in the morning, smelling like joint and a rock ‘n roll concert. Krystal would roll her eyes and shut the door, running away for a night. Then one day the routine is broken and Krystal never came back.
You’re the better daughter, Jessica - mother tells her and for a while, she too, thought she was.
Now she flips through the channel and her little sister’s smashing guitars and making millions.
11:00 PM
Jessica doesn’t think about who it is tonight - his failed artist friend, the chorus girl on Broadway, his old secretary, his new secretary. It doesn’t matter, either way.
He might be making love in someone else’s bed room for all she knows, all she cares.
11:50 PM
“Where the hell were you?”
She knows the answer but asks anyway, wanting to hear a decent lie this time.
He used to at least break a sweat, busy contemplating over his next action - thinking thoroughly with caution and fear of being caught, secrets out in the open. Not anymore. He walks through the door, tipsy with relaxed shoulders, unashamed and merciless.
“Out,” he says, cold and distant as ever, “Obviously”
Jessica puts her hands on her hips and tilts her head to the side, a displeased frown plastered on her face, just like mother had taught her.
“Now that’s just desperate, Jessica,” he says mockingly, hanging up his coat and hat, “It only works with the children and that’s just because they’re terrified of you.”
“Where were you, Donghae?”
“At the bar, drinking,” he sighs, tired of going in circles with her, “For Christ sake, Jess, could you please just get my dinner?”
She doesn’t ask, who were you with or why weren’t you here, with me. No - those things, Jessica never says. She never even thinks and it’s because she loves him - the idea of him as her prince and her as Grace Kelly. That’s the way she loves him, Lee Donghae, class C, prom king to her prom queen. The only thing she had left to hold onto.
Jessica nods resigned and mutters, “Of course.”
Donghae presses a grateful kiss on her forehead in return.
They sit in silence; she watches him eat and thinks to herself, this must be it.
12:00 PM
She keeps quiet and slips on her Mary Jane and whispers, good night to her sleeping husband.
Jessica trucks a stray wisp of blonde hair beneath her turban hat, securing her purse clasp as crisply as she anticipated closing the chapter on the Lee Donghae aspect of her life.
Down the stairs, out of the mouse trap and into her new life, awaited her saviour, her only family, the other love of her life - her little sister.
“Miss me, sis?” Krystal half-smirks, leaning against the kitchen wall with a cig in between her lips, looking exactly the same as she does on Jessica’s television screen, “I’m not gonna lie here, you’re the last person I’d expect to get a call from.”
She nods, offering a polite smile. “I’ve always thought it would be the other way around.”
“I’ve always thought you weren’t much of a runaway kind of gal.”
“I never learn to let go either,” she says, “Until now.”
Before Jessica leaves, she bakes - potato cakes - and leaves it in the oven so it keeps warm and juicy for Donghae when he wakes up to a cold bed, where she won’t be.
"You forgot your ring."
Krystal points out when they finish loading her things into the mud covered Riviera.
“No,” she shakes her head and gets in the car, “I didn’t.”
Bye-bye birdie plays on the radio, how fitting.
SOUNTRACK
Smoke Gets In Your Eyes - The Platters
Band of Gold - Don Cherry
Please Love Me Forever - Bobby Vinton
You - The Aquatones
It's Too Late - Buddy Holly
Bye-Bye Birdie - Ann Margaret
~ 2,050 w, pg, (jessica-centric/donghae)
donghae’s a solar system, he's her sun, and now that he doesn’t love her anymore, she’s stuck revolving around him.
■ companion fic to the ballad of a fool (set in the same era etc.), referring to the line "that’s what my sis told me and I’m here while she’s still at home, baking potato cakes."
■ this obvly has a soundtrack, look at the end of the post
■ no, I can't write fluff or anything happy
6:00 PM
“The salad needs more dressing.”
The maid nods like she’s been doing all day, yes and runs to the cabinet for balsamic.
“And put some honey in there.”
Jessica stands behind the kitchen counter with her hand on her hip and a cigarette held to her lips, staring down at the three children. There are only four things you need in parenthood, so she has learned, a warning look - for Jihye for playing with her food, an annoyed glance - for Daniel’s airplane noise and a forced smile - for Mi Kyong’s good table manners.
The chapter on husbands goes something like this - an angry frown for when he comes home late but what mother forgot about was what to do when he doesn’t come home at all.
6:30 PM
The actress emerges from the bus with light steps, like she’s floating, and a gust of wind blows golden ringlets back off her shoulders. A bright smile is already widening on her face. She spots her football superstar’s boyfriend and run into his open arms, they embrace then she presses a kiss to his cheek.
“That’s just like you and daddy!” Jihye says, stars in her eyes as she points at the screen.
Sometimes Jessica blames the film industry for her failures. They put a passionate kiss in between the climax and the credit, hinting a happy ending to an audience of naïve, teenage girls and they all think the same thing, look that girl’s me! She was one of them too, all fresh faced with hopes and dreams that disappears with youth and replaced with marriage.
That’s why they don’t make movies about what happens after wedding bells and big white gowns; it’s too tragic to enter the romance category.
Jessica sighs. “That’s enough TV for today,” she says and puts her hand out, demanding for the
remote, “Go to your room”
The seven years old girl nod frowns and mumbles, okay, and then up the stairs she goes.
She goes for the scotch and drinks down her sorrows.
7:00 PM
She leans into the phone, caught between her ear and her shoulder.
“Hello?”
It’s not Donghae, it never is.
“This is Jessica,” she begins, feigning a sickly sweet voice, “Donghae’s wife,” Jessica adds a beat later, “Is he still at the office by any chance?”
“Oh hey, Jessica,” a husky voice responds almost too quickly, “It’s me - Kris, I was at that dinner gathering from two week ago.”
An image of a boy with slicked back blonde hair with charcoal eyes and a messy black tie comes back to her in a flash. She remembers Donghae introducing him to her as the new addition to the partners with a hint of irritation in his tone.
“Yes, of course,” she smiles a little, “How could I forget? You were singing praises about my potato cakes.”
“I heard it’s a popular dish, now I could finally see why,” he chuckles on the other side of the line.
“About Donghae,” there’s a pause and Jessica thinks she already knows the answer, “He left early
today, around five.”
She doesn’t say anything.
‘Hello? , ‘Hello?’, she hears and ignores.
He hangs up. She blinks hazily at the telephone for a moment but the verdicts out and it’s not what
she wants to hear but what she expects to hear.
Jessica wonders why she’s still surprised after all this time.
7:30 PM
She sits on the chair she picked, drums her finger against the oak table he carved, use the edge of the ashtray her mother in law bought to stub out her cigarette.
All of this takes place under the roof of a house Jessica chose - a little white house in Gangnam with a fence and a rose garden, Jessica was eight months pregnant with Da Eun and wanted their daughter to be born and raised in a house, not a two bedroom apartment in the midst of city’s pollution.
Donghae designed the baby’s room - cotton candy pink walls with white clouds and little butterflies. He came home with the cot and finds her lying at the end of the staircase, bleeding.
They baby died and she thinks, so did his love for her.
He painted the room black, the only one in the white house. It turns into his working space. Donghae doesn’t bother to lock the door for privacy; he doesn’t need to, the memories are too much for her to take.
Every now and then, she thinks about the baby-that-wasn’t and how it could have fixed everything that was ever wrong between them. That little girl could have been their rock - the thing that holds them together instead of creating a gaping hole between them.
And just like that Jessica’s dream house transformed into her worst nightmare.
8:00 PM
It starts raining.
Everything outside the window is grey and splattered. The steady tapping sound fills the room, drowning out the faint hum of chatter from the television. There's lighting, Mi Kyong’s horrified shrieks blend in with the weather condition and Jessica pretends she doesn’t hear.
She takes off her ring and starts to cry into still-smooth hands, nail polish matched to her lipstick like always.
The thunder stops and she does too, wiping away her tears with her forefinger and standing up in just a second and with the usual grace in her steps, she begins to walk in the direction of the kitchen.
There’s a plate of his dinner, untouched, roast beef.
Jessica leaves it in the oven; Donghae will be back by nine, she’s sure of it.
(It’s nine and she’s still alone in the darkness.)
9:15 PM
Daniel tip toes down the stairs and into the living room. He looks like Donghae with his doe eyes and faded brown hair, Jessica wants to scream at him.
“What are you doing out of bed?”
He looks up at her, a wide smile as she offers her a story book he picked a week ago. “Daddy still needs to read me my bed time story.”
“Go back to bed.”
“But da -“
“Daddy can read you the book some other time,” She holds the flicker of the lighter against the tip of a new cigarette, “Now get some sleep, you have school tomorrow.”
“No!” the boy screams, falling to the floor and flailing his arms up and around in a manner that frightens her, “No, no, no, I want daddy! Where’s daddy?”
His question is like an unsolvable crossword puzzle with no right answer. She doesn’t know how to answer her son’s question correctly - it’s not a definite ‘yes’ or ‘no’ because she doesn’t know where Donghae is or when he’s coming back, if he’s coming back. Her heart sinks at this and she thinks she should have known better.
“I said,” Jessica’s yelling now, flushed in the face with frustration shines clear in her eyes, “Go. Back. To. Bed.”
Daniel wails all the way back to his room, tripping over the carpet multiple of time until Ji Hye comes to his rescue, wrapping her tiny hand around his as she leads him back to his room.
“Just like your father!"
She screams and Daniel doesn’t hear it, just like Donghae.
10:00 PM
She digs out their wedding tape. What for, she doesn’t know, reliving the past won’t change the present.
She goes through high school with certain expectations and those expectations included a doe-eyed, crooked smile someone who would hold her heart in his hands and say he loved her, loved every single part of her, bad or good, through sickness or health.
Those expectations belonged in their vows, together ‘till they part.
Jessica likes to thinks that boy from high school wasn’t Donghae but someone else - a teenage
dreams that stayed only a pleasant memory and didn’t turn into an unpleasant reality.
Donghae’s a solar system, he's her sun, and now that he doesn’t love her anymore, she’s stuck revolving around him.
10:30 PM
The thing is, Jessica plays housewife growing up, wearing red lipstick, making cucumber sandwiches for her dolls, asking unanswered questions about their day while drinking tea out of plastic cups.
Not her sister.
Krystal’s all punk rock t-shirts, ripped jeans, applying a bit too much eyeliner with Beach Boys playing loudly in the background.
Their mother scolded, complained, went on about this or that as Krystal runs in and out of the house at four in the morning, smelling like joint and a rock ‘n roll concert. Krystal would roll her eyes and shut the door, running away for a night. Then one day the routine is broken and Krystal never came back.
You’re the better daughter, Jessica - mother tells her and for a while, she too, thought she was.
Now she flips through the channel and her little sister’s smashing guitars and making millions.
11:00 PM
Jessica doesn’t think about who it is tonight - his failed artist friend, the chorus girl on Broadway, his old secretary, his new secretary. It doesn’t matter, either way.
He might be making love in someone else’s bed room for all she knows, all she cares.
11:50 PM
“Where the hell were you?”
She knows the answer but asks anyway, wanting to hear a decent lie this time.
He used to at least break a sweat, busy contemplating over his next action - thinking thoroughly with caution and fear of being caught, secrets out in the open. Not anymore. He walks through the door, tipsy with relaxed shoulders, unashamed and merciless.
“Out,” he says, cold and distant as ever, “Obviously”
Jessica puts her hands on her hips and tilts her head to the side, a displeased frown plastered on her face, just like mother had taught her.
“Now that’s just desperate, Jessica,” he says mockingly, hanging up his coat and hat, “It only works with the children and that’s just because they’re terrified of you.”
“Where were you, Donghae?”
“At the bar, drinking,” he sighs, tired of going in circles with her, “For Christ sake, Jess, could you please just get my dinner?”
She doesn’t ask, who were you with or why weren’t you here, with me. No - those things, Jessica never says. She never even thinks and it’s because she loves him - the idea of him as her prince and her as Grace Kelly. That’s the way she loves him, Lee Donghae, class C, prom king to her prom queen. The only thing she had left to hold onto.
Jessica nods resigned and mutters, “Of course.”
Donghae presses a grateful kiss on her forehead in return.
They sit in silence; she watches him eat and thinks to herself, this must be it.
12:00 PM
She keeps quiet and slips on her Mary Jane and whispers, good night to her sleeping husband.
Jessica trucks a stray wisp of blonde hair beneath her turban hat, securing her purse clasp as crisply as she anticipated closing the chapter on the Lee Donghae aspect of her life.
Down the stairs, out of the mouse trap and into her new life, awaited her saviour, her only family, the other love of her life - her little sister.
“Miss me, sis?” Krystal half-smirks, leaning against the kitchen wall with a cig in between her lips, looking exactly the same as she does on Jessica’s television screen, “I’m not gonna lie here, you’re the last person I’d expect to get a call from.”
She nods, offering a polite smile. “I’ve always thought it would be the other way around.”
“I’ve always thought you weren’t much of a runaway kind of gal.”
“I never learn to let go either,” she says, “Until now.”
Before Jessica leaves, she bakes - potato cakes - and leaves it in the oven so it keeps warm and juicy for Donghae when he wakes up to a cold bed, where she won’t be.
"You forgot your ring."
Krystal points out when they finish loading her things into the mud covered Riviera.
“No,” she shakes her head and gets in the car, “I didn’t.”
Bye-bye birdie plays on the radio, how fitting.
SOUNTRACK
Smoke Gets In Your Eyes - The Platters
Band of Gold - Don Cherry
Please Love Me Forever - Bobby Vinton
You - The Aquatones
It's Too Late - Buddy Holly
Bye-Bye Birdie - Ann Margaret