Best First Worst Date | jihan au

1.

       Joshua is a sweating mess.

       There is no better way to kick off a first date than receiving a call from the restaurant you had made a reservation at, informing you that the place is closed because they are currently experiencing issues with their plumbing. Therefore, the news leaves Joshua as nothing but an utter mess of quick phone calls and pleas to see if they can squeeze him in for 8:30 PM, table of two.

And like the professional cuisine businesses that they are, no matter how Joshua offered to pay double, ignoring his crying bank account, they all said no, they are booked out.

With frustrated forehead wrinkles and an unnecessarily tight grasp on panhandles and other kitchen gadgets, Joshua names himself as the head chef at Hong's Famous Chop House right in his own apartment. The name has a nice ring to it, he thinks, but there isn't time left to come up with anything better as he realizes the time displayed on the corner of his iPad, joined by an open browser with a recipe by Martha Stewart blaring right back at him.

Joshua moves a carrot faster against the grinder, unsure whether there are supposed to be carrots in the recipe, honestly. He might have skipped a step. He doesn't recall. He doesn't have time to remove his rubber gloves, wash his hands, and scroll back to the top of fancy English words Martha thinks she can pull out of her ass and expect everyone to understand.

Sorry, Mrs. Stewart, he's really stressed out here.

Can you blame him? It's not every day a friend of yours graciously invites you over to a bar for a couple of rounds of drinks and bottomless baskets of wings, joined by a few new faces that Joshua has yet to meet due to the fact he spends most of his days in front of his computer and sketches and coordinates buildings for big companies. He's an architect. Catch his drift.

That night, sucking on a wing bone in one hand, with a cold glass of Bud Light in the other, immersed in a conversation with Seokmin, amongst the new faces Junhui introduces him to is a man by the name of Yoon Jeonghan.

The most beautiful, eye-opening man he has ever seen, Joshua adds.

He is sure to hint at his interest and observation as he shakes the soft hand after he runs to the bathrooms to wash his sauce-covered ones, of course.

And with desperate texts later that night with Junhui to confirm whether the blonde is single or not, and his response that the blonde, too, is interested in the former, Joshua tells him if he's willing to accept a date.

The blonde says yes, telling Junhui to give him the location and time.

Joshua does so, before being told the closed news.

Luckily, with a million thoughts running through his head, Joshua remembers to forward the information and update the location from a fancy restaurant to his apartment, keeping the time the same. Joshua begins to regret not setting the time an hour later, as he is cutting his life away like one of those contestants on Chopped, crunchtime more serious than ever.

"I have to restart my potatoes~" He cried, head tossed back and a lid in hand to see the contents inside the pot. Instead of potatoes, he throws away a gooey blob of over-boiled rice in the trash can.

He is not a cook.

Fuck, he wished he had accepted his mother's gift of a rice cooker before moving out here.

       It was when Joshua successfully had been able to boil rice, cut vegetables, and not burn the shrimp when he suddenly heard delicates knocks on the front of his door, sending him in complete overdrive because he swore he had at least 10 minutes left.