Flowers and Music
Romance short. A man becomes besotted with his neighbour, a violinist.
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3.5k, rated T, just some sweetness and gentle teasing between two neighbours in the same building! Adapted from a TweetFic.
Jin-hyuk was obsessed almost from the get-go.
His mother always listened to classical music at home, and while his stint in his orchestra had been short-lived — his parents had been torn between wanting him to learn to play an instrument and not being able to stand the agony of listening to him learn, and eventually they’d relented on him not playing French horn anymore so long as he kept winning medals as a runner — he’d seen the violinists and the cellists play, and none of them had ever played like his neighbour did.
Jin-hyuk’s neighbour, this guy, always in a fucking smoking jacket like some man in a classic movie, but he couldn’t be older than forty. He’d go out on his balcony to play, sometimes bringing a music stand out with the pages paperclipped in place so that they wouldn’t be caught by the breeze, but most often he’d come out with no stand and just… play.
He’d play pieces from memory and he’d play them beautifully, swaying to the music with his eyes closed — he’d improvise as he went, go between music that Jin-hyuk knew and that he’d heard before and new stuff, stuff he conjured up by just going with the flow, and it’d all knit together, one melody flowing into the next.
He got so lost in it, his eyes closing, a slight smile on his face, a stray curl of hair often falling over his forehead as he leaned into the bow — and how could Jin-hyuk not stare, from time to time, at the way he rested his chin in the violin’s rest when he used it, imagine the weight of his chin and cheek in Jin-hyuk’s palm?
He tried to watch subtly.
He didn’t know that much about music or about violins really, except to recognise some of the pieces he played most, but he was pretty sure he must be a professional in some capacity because he was out there two or three times a week, seemed to practice even more inside.
There was less than a four foot gap between Jin-Hyuk’s balcony and the other man’s, way too close together to not be obvious, so he tried to be subtle.