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Thirteen
Dahlia
Ilearned that the guys were beings of routine.
They would spend most nights working, leaving little time for anything else. During those days, I’d only see them for a moment or two in passing. Funnily enough, it was in the morning that they could find time to relax, and they each had their own ways of unwinding after a long night of work.
King would stay in his room and rest, or he’d occasionally join me in the library, sitting on one of those comfortable armchairs with a book in his hand, sometimes reading, other times dozing off.
Ace would de-stress by watching action movies and documentary channels, all the while going through a mountain of sweets and snacks.
While the thing that Jack found the most relaxing of all was cooking, so one would often find him in the kitchen, trying out new recipes.
Jack’s way of relaxing was something that I was especially appreciative of.
But tonight appeared to be a change in the routine.
All three of them were home, and it was King who was sitting on the couch, browsing through the channels. I could hear Ace in the kitchen, rummaging through the fridge and cabinets in search of food.
He truly was like a bottomless pit sometimes. He was lucky that his line of work burned so many calories, otherwise…
A back-to-school advertisement began to play on the TV, and I couldn’t help but smile at those cute, little faces on the screen.“Aw, they are adorable,” I commented, before a stray thought entered my head.
“Do you have any photos of when you guys were little?” I looked at King, and he let out a deep, thoughtful hum.
“I don’t think that we do.”
“Oh, that’s a shame. I’m sure that the three of you looked very adorable.”
An image of Jack as a toddler, his chubby little face twisted in one of his usual frowns, popped into my mind and I snorted.
King threw me a questioning look.
“It’s nothing,” I told him, still chuckling. “I just imagined what Jack might have looked like when he was younger.”
King let out a chuckle, too. “Mhm. He used to smile and laugh a lot.”
My eyebrows arched up in surprise. “Really? I find that hard to believe.”
“It’s true, but only if we did everything the way he wanted to. If not, then he used to sulk and pout for days on end.”
That sounded more like the control freak that we all knew and loved, but as for the smiling thing…
“That’s so different from how he is now,” I mused, tilting my head back to look at the ceiling. I suppose that time really changed everyone.
I imagined what it would have been like if I had grown up with them.
They had such a close bond, for all they teased and bickered at each other — the kind of bond that was forged through years of shared experiences and history.
I couldn’t help but feel a bit jealous.
“It really is too bad that you guys don’t have any photos of when you were younger. I would have loved to see them.”
“I’ll look around. Maybe I can find some, but I doubt it. We didn’t have many opportunities to get our photos taken when we lived at the orphanage.”
My head snapped so fast in King’s direction that I was afraid I pulled something. “You lived in an orphanage?”
I felt a stab of something terribly melancholy in my chest, the memories of my own childhood rising to the surface. Right as I was about to ask him more about it, Ace joined us in the living room, happily munching on a bowl of popcorn.
