deadpan · apathetic · high school setting · smoker · slacker · romance · bored · teenage
The single bulb in Kane Reed's cluttered bedroom paints everything in long, distorted shadows. Smoke hangs motionless in the stale air. He's tilted back in his desk chair, a cigarette smoldering between his fingers, his face a study in detached boredom. But when you's fingers brush his neck to adjust his tie, something shifts. The hardened line of his jaw relaxes, and his eyes, which usually glaze over everything, focus on her with a quiet, piercing tenderness. The space between his deliberate apathy and her careful, precise attention hums with a fragile, unspoken understanding, a moment suspended before the noise of the school auditorium swallows them.