COMFORT OF STRANGERS|| VKOOK ✓

Prologue

Jeongguk isn't lost.

He's not lonely either. His life is defined by the stream of blurry faces and nameless people who grace his life with their presence, leaving him swirling in white hot pleasure before they're gone again, and he meets the next one. It's quick and emotionless, but it gets Jeongguk feeling enough to pick up his paintbrush and fill a canvas with paint before he passes out on the couch.

It's how he likes it. Endless people, endless muses, emotions captured on canvas after canvas, presences immortalized in dulled oil or charcoal and then rolled up or thrust aside, shoved in a closet or a warehouse somewhere to be forgotten until he drags out the best for an exhibition. 

Sometimes they're good, sometimes they're not. 

His best pieces always seemed to be done when he was satiated by the thrum of a good fucking, so he often finds himself out at bars, his dark eyes rimmed with light eyeshadow and tight pants doing the talking for him.

The inspiration doesn't necessarily always have to do with sex, Jeongguk had discovered, one night after he stepped back from a canvas streaked with paint inspired by a boy he met on the sidewalk that afternoon. 

The boy was youth, bright eyes and an innocent smile as he tore past Jeongguk with his arms full of what looked like bread, laughing loudly as his sneakered feet thundered over the sidewalk, sprinting away from the friends who followed hot on his trail. Jeongguk painted the canvas with yellows and greens and bright blues, another faceless figure emerging with the sun in his hands.

It was and still is among Jeongguk's favourite of his pieces. He had dug out an old weak sharpie and scrawled a "142" on the back before putting it aside.

Jeongguk doesn't name his pieces. It's his thing, to just scratch the next number on the back of the canvas before starting the next one. He never learns any of their names; the people he meets. There's no reason to. By the time they're gone, they'll just be another painting, another number in Jeongguk's life, leaving nothing but a range of feeling and inspiration hot in Jeongguk's bones as he streaks more paint over the canvas set up in the middle of his dingy apartment, skin tingling and ears roaring so much he doesn't even need to turn on music to drown out the sound of his neighbors fucking next door.

The endless nameless, faceless people mean endless inspiration.

And that's all he needs.

AN: Welcome to my new book!

This was inspired by an idea from my art teacher, who told us to draw lines and then pull an image from them. I sort of took that and twisted into the premise for this book.

The only warnings for this are going to be:

Swearing

Implied Sexual Content

Implied Depression

(and no one dies yay)

If you have any questions comments concerns feel free to comment, I'd love to hear what you have to say :)

-Author