When Yoongi returned home, he felt extremely tired; overwhelmed by emotions and questions about the kind of storm he had gone through in that small theater in Seoul's cultural district.
After leaving the theater with the girl, he had barely uttered a word, neither during the walk to the taxi stand nor inside the car. The girl looked at him with a certain embarrassment, but he couldn't do anything else: in fact, he had nothing to say.
He made up a couple of excuses on the spot about having a stomachache, filling his lie with unnecessary details to try to cover the awkward silence.
She looked at him tenderly and almost with a hint of compassion; surely his friend Kim Namjoon had described him as somewhat odd, and she probably hadn't even started with high expectations for that kind of blind date. Namjoon and he had known each other for a relatively short time; his family's company was the client for a project Yoongi had been working on for about a month. They had become friends because Namjoon was a very charismatic man and had impressed him with his intelligence and incredible culture. They had started meeting at the tennis club to play some formal matches, but then they realized they had many interests in common related to the world of art and alternative music, and the bond had grown stronger with each passing day.
Who knows, Yoongi thought, how Kim Namjoon had come up with the idea of introducing her to him, and who knows how he had managed to convince her to go out with him. He could be considered an all-around decent-looking guy but with a terrible reputation for being gruff and detached; an ice man who avoided most of the public events his colleagues attended. She, on the other hand, was considered a celebrity in the Korean architecture and art world for her beauty and the incredible vision she had in her work.
"I'm truly sorry about tonight, I promise I'll make it up to you," he told her as they walked from the taxi to the gate of the residence where she lived.
"Don't worry, call me if you want, I'd love to pick up where we left off with that dinner we didn't manage to have today."
Lili bent down slightly to give him a quick kiss on the cheek and then made a slight bow.
"I'm glad anyway that we convinced you to go to the dance performance at Hope's school; the dancers were incredible. I noticed you were very interested, even though Joonie told me that dance wasn't really your thing."
Yoongi felt embarrassed by those words because he didn't think that the thing—that thing he couldn't even name, that witchcraft, the temporary stupor he had suffered—had been so obvious.
He was wrong.
She had noticed his reaction very well even without knowing him that much. The interested eyes, the body leaning toward the blue-haired dancer, the arms closed defensively. She was an observer, precise, with penetrating and clever eyes: Yoongi noted all of this as a set of very seductive characteristics in her.
He still tried to make up for it with a casual phrase, "Well, Namjoon has only known me for a short time. I'm a man full of surprises."
"I have no doubts about that, architect Min. Good night, I hope to see you soon," she replied with an intriguing look and retreating toward the entrance door.
Yoongi waited to see her enter, as befits a true gentleman, and as soon as he turned around, he made a puzzled sideways nod with his head and lit a cigarette.
"What the fuck came over me?" he spoke aloud as he exhaled the smoke after a long drag.
He decided to walk home; it wasn't very far, but about thirty-five minutes of walking awaited him. He needed the fresh, crisp early spring air to try to make sense of the disastrous date he'd just had.
Starting from the rhythm of his steps, Yoongi tried to retrieve in his head the music he had heard earlier and, above all, to review that guy's moves, the vision of him in its entirety. He wanted to welcome it into his memory and rethink the sensations they had generated in him. He thought about what would be the first free day when he could go to the club because he felt a strong need to play and free himself by composing, as he always did when he felt oppressed by some intrusive thought.
He hated the idea of having to get up early again the next day to live his usual life as an architect: studio, work meetings with his colleague Jungkook, site visits, discussions with workers whom he generally considered boors, and a forced smile at the site foreman he'd been stuck with on this project, Kim Seokjin. Who would surely overwhelm him with words and jokes he never wanted to hear.
Yoongi had become an architect through family inheritance: his father and grandfather ran one of Seoul's most important firms.
He loved the history of architecture and art but hated the practical part of his work. The bureaucracy, the rampant and graceless luxury that many of his clients demanded, the lack of attention to the environment, to silence and elegance, his family's ambition, the rough and masculine world of construction sites, dealing with clients, meetings with partners at the tennis club—all of that world in general. He found it devoid of art and beauty, aseptic, venal, tied solely to appearances.
He, on the other hand, was a man full of explosive emotions and colors; he was passionate about few things, and few people had truly interested him, and he didn't like to waste words or pretend. This made him seem introverted, cold; he was first and foremost just very honest with himself.
Two, three times a week, he took off the mask of the performing professional and participated in sweaty, angry, brawling, honest street rap battles, which were often won by him without great effort; he had also built quite a reputation in underground circles under the name Agust D.
As he walked in the cold of late winter in Seoul, the images of the blue dancer continued to haunt him forcefully.
"What's your name?" he said as he exhaled cigarette smoke. "Who are you?" In his head, a feeling of restlessness moved through his chest; there was a scent, a movement, the quick vision of a hand with rings twirling in the air. The profile of a neck, strong and at the same time delicate, enough to lose your mind over.
"How do I find him?" he murmured again, trying to disguise his out-loud monologue as a couple passing near him looked at him curiously. "I look like a crazy person," he muttered. "I see a guy dancing and I feel like I've had a fucking revelation."
For a moment, some of the people he had dated in his life came to mind; there had been several girls during university, always very simple stories that hadn't left him much. As soon as he started frequenting the world of alternative music and art, he had opened himself to other experiences, more passionate but always fleeting, which had confronted him with the awareness of being pansexual. A reality about himself that he had accepted without great suffering, in a serene and fluid way.
Never, however, had a person with such an ethereal and ambiguous appearance called his attention in such a visceral way. It was all enough to shake his certainties—him, someone quite controlled and with predictable reactions.
The people who had managed to approach his heart or arouse some interest had, at a certain point, found the definitive passage closed and a crown of thorns waiting for them, and so, one by one, they had distanced themselves without great drama.
He now lived with the certainty of being a solitary person and had settled into this reality, not having known any other.
Until that evening.
He wanted to hold all his sensations tight. As if the world had suddenly acquired color.
"Blue. Blue hair," he said again.
Yoongi thought about the face his father would make—a conservative and pragmatic man—if in some parallel universe he were confessing to having become infatuated with the line of the chin, neck, and body of a boy he'd never met who danced like an angel. Or like a satyr would dance at the court of a Roman emperor. He laughed because the statement seemed too absurd even for himself.
He entered the house and immediately headed for the fridge where he found a half-empty bottle of whisky; he took it and filled a glass that he downed without much ceremony. He changed out of his office clothes to put on black sweatpants and a white t-shirt; he took his guitar and the glass he had filled again and went to sit on the couch where his big brown cat Shooky was sleeping. As soon as he saw him arrive, he lazily opened his eyes and turned around, giving him his butt and continuing to snore.
"I'm weird, with a weird cat... and an asshole one too. Everyone gets the pets they deserve," he said as he petted the animal's muzzle, which accepted the caresses somewhat reluctantly.
He placed the glass on the table and closed his eyes to try to retrieve those guitar notes that had been imprinted in his head; he wanted to compose something on those notes. To call back to himself the incredible warmth he had felt in his chest that evening at the theater, the black and blue figure that by moving had stirred something very deep in him. A primordial call. Warmth, movements, and beauty to which he was not at all accustomed.
I don't know your name
I don't know your name
Not even music managed to wake him from his thoughts.
He took his phone, obsessively searching for the dancer's name.