Antidote // Reader x Park Jimin

1) 3:00 AM

The water from your soapy rag had begun to soak into your skin. You set the rag down on the table for a second to assess the damage. Sure enough, the pruniness of your skin was evident. You only had one more booth left before the entire bar was wiped down. It was typically like this every night. There was a certain lull in business just around 3:00 AM.

Part of you wanted to believe that it had something to do with the witching hour, but you knew it just came down to it being the in-between time of the night. It wasn't the breach of morning or one of the few hours lurking into the depths of the night. Considering that the bar you worked at wasn't exactly a party place, most got their drinking done in a fair amount of time and went home before it was too ridiculous of an hour.

3:00 AM truly seemed to be the darkest, quietest hour of your night. Strangely, you'd often have a few people come in around 4:00 or 5:00 AM, people who had worked the night shift and just wanted to take the edge off a bit. These tended to be your favorite people. They weren't always angry at life, or partying with their friends, or drinking to get drunk. Just an hour, or a half an hour, they chose to spend by themselves for themselves. It's something you had admired and always wished you could have for yourself. You'd often admire these individuals from a distance at your place on the other side of the bar, wondering what their story was and what had happened to bring them to that exact spot at that hour of the night. You wouldn't disturb them unless they wanted to talk. Most of the time, though, they order and then simply drank their drink, staring forward, lost in thought. It was their hour to just exist, in the simplest terms of existing. Their hour to lose themselves within themselves.

You thought that maybe 3:00 AM was that hour for you, whatever the reason. You could use it to sit and think, or maybe have a drink for yourself. You could do whatever you wanted- listen to music, watch late night TV shows, anything. You could do anything. No one was there to tell you otherwise.

However, you were never the type to just do anything. Well, maybe early in life you could've had that mentality. But things quickly changed, and you found yourself in a set framework for life. Work was work, college was work, and home was sleep. Nothing more and nothing less. So, when the last customer stepped out of the bar at 2:59 and 3:00 AM rolled around, you still found yourself bussing tables like a madwoman. Work was work. You liked to keep it that way.

And because work was work, you found yourself keeping a moderate distance from your coworkers, utilizing breaks to work on class assignments, and any shifts shared with another worker only ever resulted in small talk. You tried to be as distant as possible while still remaining amicable, and it seemed to work out well for you. You learned a long time ago that keeping distance often was the safest choice, allowing you to focus on your work and not get too wrapped up in drama or other's lives. Distance especially kept people from getting too wrapped up in your sob-story of a life, and that was practically critical toward your survival at this point. You had so much baggage, especially emotional, that you didn't even want to face. However, despite your distance and reservation, all of your coworkers still respected and appreciated you, mostly because you ended up doing a lot of their job for them.

Your back ached. You could feel your ankles swelling from the hours of you being on your feet. Your hands were dry and somewhat flaky from the table scrubbing and spilled alcohol. Your hair was slowly but surely falling out of the ponytail, pieces of it dangling in front of your vision. Your shirt was starting to untuck itself and you noticed a mustard stain from earlier that you still hadn't washed out. You could feel the weight of the hard work in your eyes, in your posture, eagerly awaiting the sweet release of sleep.

As much as you longed for it, you knew that sleep would not come soon. You'd finish your shift at 6:00 AM and spend the next two hours finishing up your assignments before heading to your first class of the day. You wouldn't be able to truly collapse into bed until probably 2:00 PM, that is if you didn't have an essay or project to finish up before your next shift started at 10:00 PM.