[3] There Be Fools Alive | Hongjoong ✓

three | there be no such thing as luck

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SHE WASTED TEN MINUTES PURCHASING an Americano downstairs; the remaining twenty, JoJo decided would be fit for multitasking. Drinking and pacing. Office in thirty started bearing suggestions of a death threat. In between, she'd made use of a minute thinking Hongjoong could use a coffee too, although that was sure to push it and have the irate man getting in touch with his breaking point. In retrospect, overstepping boundaries was surely a gesture to push him towards the brink of no return.

   JoJo eyed the black door with no intent. Her shoulders sagged, nonintimidating eyes tilting to the handle. There hadn't been a time she could remember feeling this discomposed and it was safe to say it went beyond a conscious recognition. As if on cue, his friend (the only one he permitted here at work, that friend? Remember that friend?) approached her. Out of the corner of an eye, JoJo made him out.

   "Already in trouble?" Song Mingi asked in greeting. "What has become of you, JoJo?"

   Like something of a knee-jerk, her head shot up. She grew livid all of a sudden and the current state of her countenance made JoJo decide attributing everything to the mist of uncertainty seeming to hang in the air. While she'd had many summons from Hongjoong before now, none had shadowed thoughtless interrogative sessions she'd had the sauce to invoke. Because she felt like it? Once again, JoJo couldn't comprehend what had come over her; a first of its kind. So, she came about favouring the idea that perhaps she might as well have always been as unethical as her housemate was known to be, which must explain why she learned to tolerate Soobin.

   "I am a model employee!" By now, JoJo had lost total sight of what to defend. Nonexistent pride, maybe? "I don't get in trouble. Ever." There was a part, too, believing the louder she asserted it, that in some unbelievable but undeniable way it might go ahead and soothe Hongjoong's turbulent mind in his office.

   Firstly, Mingi's reaction had been to smile, like a simpering fool before cracking up, like an amused nitwit. His laughter was the kind that would surge up from the deep depths, which tended to make JoJo rule he must be one of those who lived problem-free. Always optimistic. And sometimes, she would wonder how he did it. Mingi was also holding an Americano from the café downstairs, cup half-empty.

   "I know." He nipped through a straw as he shrugged. "Although there's a first for everything. I always said he couldn't have a soft spot for you forever."

   JoJo scoffed, upon deeming soft spot could be subjective. Apparently, Mingi appeared part of the lot to have misperceptions, take a thing like soft spot and call it deep affection. Fondness was blasphemy enough as it were. No. It couldn't be. Definitely not if she was the quickest thing to slip his mind. All the damn time. That alone had exempted her from becoming favoured employee. And there was Mingi, with the nerve to speak of soft spots?

   Ha!

   Yeah.

   Right.

   JoJo let go and sniggered—under her breath, but Mingi picked it up. For the first time, she was realizing the word carried its own skosh of humour. Maybe dark, maybe unfunny. Feelings, that is. In a way, she seemed to cohabit with it. That was the moment it occured to JoJo that if she could blackball feelings, then all there would've been from the start was a passionate working-class woman of twenty-seven, aboard the generic train committed to sucking up to the head honcho. It came barrelling in as a dawning how much of a completely different person she would've been. Yet when it boiled down to whether it was a scenario worth living, JoJo didn't know.