Chapter Text
Tine has never been one for tomfoolery. Of course, he sometimes engaged in ridiculous antics with his friends all in the name of good fun, even getting himself into trouble a couple of times but he always drew a line at senseless, inappropriate and possibly illegal conduct.
He has a standard he adheres to, a moral principle you could say, of not engaging in any juvenile behaviour outside of the confines of his home, or even at school that would leave him with a reddened, belt-whipped ass and an equally reddened mother on the verge of committing a homicide.
So, it doesn’t really make sense how he had allowed himself to get into this crappy situation this fateful evening.
Well, the amount of alcohol in his system might be to blame, and his friends played a huge part in that too, but he mostly blames himself for having fallen victim to their inebriated taunts, given that his current state of sobriety left him little room for logical reasoning.
He hiccups as he nears the beverage cooler, his head spinning as he tries to keep himself upright. He almost accidentally knocks over a stand of junk foods as he approaches, and he widens his eyes, attempting to dispel his double vision.
He trips on his own shoelace, of all things, and suddenly he’s falling.
He braces himself for the impact that never comes, and it takes him a few moments to realise that he’s being held upright once again. Confused, he furrows his brows as he stares at the shiny, black tactical boots so completely different to his own Nike’s .
“Did I wear the wrong pair this morning…” he mumbles to himself, puzzled.
“You alright, kid?” It’s a calm, almost monotone voice that asks him, and he looks up, narrowing his eyes as he tries to make sense of the man’s face.
What greets him is a shockingly handsome sight, and he freezes.
Not because the guy is breathtakingly good looking, although that in itself is a cause for pause as Tine’s breath whooshes out of him, but mostly because the man is dashingly decked in uniform.
Police uniform.
He gawks, expression like that of a fish out of water. He scrambles to get out of the vice-like grip, and the policeman just stares at him curiously.
“Hey. I asked if you were alright.”
“I-I-I’m f-f-fine, sir,” he replies, trying to steady himself. Behind the man, through the clear glass of the convenience store, he vaguely makes out the three silhouettes belonging to his friends, bent over in what seems to be an optimal position for regurgitation, or boisterous cackling; he isn’t sure which.
The handsome officer stares at him with a raised eyebrow for a few moments and scratches the back of his head, ruffling his perfect hair into a sexy mess.
“How old are you?”
“19, wait, I mean 20, dude. Why?” he cringes at his mouth’s clumsiness and his audacity to even call the man out so familiarly, however, ever since he’d gotten into college, the term had been handy in calling out to someone whom he had met before, but whose name he hadn’t remembered. Also, he wants to kick himself for having the boldness to even ask why. Why indeed, Tine?
The officer’s eyebrows furrow and he tilts his head to the side, a thoughtful look on his face.
“Oh. You’re legal. Good, I thought you were younger,” he says, shrugging as he turns away from Tine. “I would have detained you for underage drinking.”
He’s a little dumbstruck by how the man chooses not to question him, despite the obvious blunder. Does he really believe Tine or is he just too lazy to care? Were all policemen slobbing around these days? Also, how had the man so efficiently picked up on Tine’s drunkenness?
“For one, your breath smells like alcohol, and two, you can’t even walk straight, dude.”
What? Did he say his question out loud?
His eyebrows rise to his forehead, and in his mind, he detests the man for speaking to him so condescendingly and hitting him back with his iconic ‘dude’ as he walks away from the scene like a movie star.
He wants to curse at him, but instead, Tine brilliantly replies with, “Ohhhh! I see! I see? Oh wow, I see!”
He doesn’t even understand the bullshit he’s currently spouting off, doesn’t even know what’s remotely hilarious about it, but his inebriated self doesn’t even seem to care as he starts laughing.
Noticing the policeman gone from his sight, he sobers up a little and does not wallow in the humiliation at having been left to laugh alone like a madman, and hurries back to the task at hand.
He hesitantly opens the cooler, shivering as the cold air blasts towards his reddened face. He browses through all the available options, before he settles on two bottles and pulls them out.
Pausing, he looks behind him, then left and right, and once he deduces he’s in the clear, stuffs the bottles hurriedly inside his jacket and cringes as they clang against one another awkwardly against his stomach. He catches a glimpse of his reflection on the glass and does a double take because he looks pregnant.
He worries his bottom lip, as thoughts of the police officer coming back to catch him in the act leads him to rethink his current life decisions. Is a misdemeanour charge really worth it for two bottles of alcohol?
The thought is easy enough to answer, but because he’s imbibed his body with an ungodly amount of intoxicant, his lucidity and therefore his already weak ability to cogitate logically is compromised and Tine furrows his brows, confused and shaken by this sweat-inducing dilemma.
“What am I doing?” he asks himself, feeling a sense of guilt as he realises the profundity of his actions. He frowns and turns away from the cooler, swaying slightly. On the corner of his periphery, he makes out a bag of potato chips and he swipes them off the shelf quickly before he tries to locate the cashier.
Finally, he stands in front of the counter, seeing the bored looking cashier, whose face and movements strangely remind Tine of a lethargic, possibly also drunk sloth.
“Sir, please go to the back of the line,” she says drowsily, and Tine thinks that she’s strangely talkative for someone who looks to be in a semicomatose state.
Tine just stares at her blankly, before she sighs exasperatedly and shocks Tine with an eye roll, thus reinforcing Tine’s belief that she may need some sort of help with the way she looks so ready to collapse after that backbreaking side-eye.
“Sir, this Mr. Policeman here lined up first. You just cut in and scurried in front of him like a rat.”
At the mention, Tine whips his head around to see that good-looking policeman standing behind him with a stony look on his face.
“Oh. It’s you again, dude,” he slurs, patting the man’s shoulder. “Just let me pay for this bag of chips, and you won’t see me ever again, yeah?”
He turns back towards the cashier, who rolls her eyes at him with such utter disgust that Tine is sure she catches a glimpse of her brain in that moment. Nevertheless, she scans his potato chips.
“30 baht,” she says, and Tine searches his pockets for his wallet when he realises that it’s no longer there. He frowns and feels for his jacket, roaming his hands around, but then, there’s an undeniable sound of glass clinking against one another. Tine feels dread slowly drain the blood down from his face.
“Ahem.”
He feels more than he hears the cough behind him, and he slowly turns to look at the policeman, looking like a deer caught in the headlights.
“I think you dropped this?” he raises a perfect brow as Tine’s mouth gapes open at the sight of his wallet, flipped open to show the shit-eating grin on his face on his driver’s license and all the other damning information of his life, such as his birthday.
Tine hopes that the man is shit at maths.
“Oh! Y-yeah! Haha! My god! O-Oopsies! Did I drop it? Oh, silly me!” he laughs too hard, and even through his alcohol- impaired hearing, he realises it sounds a tiny bit fake and somewhat plastic.
“I’m kind of in a rush right now, and like, I need to… go…” he reaches out to snatch his wallet away, but he sees clones of the man and moves to the wrong one, therefore grasping at air.
Suddenly, the man gropes at his chest, and Tine freezes. The offending hand doesn’t move for a few moments, only feeling the muscle there, before it trails down to feel the unmistakeable hardness of the alcohol bottles, doing a devastatingly awful job at keeping themselves hidden.
The policeman’s eyes glint with something akin to that of amusement, and Tine genuinely wonders what’s so merry about his current situation, as he feels himself die inside.
“O-Oh my, how could they have g-gotten there!” he stutters out, cursing inwardly as he feels his stomach rumbling angrily, having been threatened and stressed by this sudden terror-inducing turn of events and jeopardising his hours’ worth of alcoholic guzzling.
“Gee, I wonder,” the man delivers with as much enthusiasm as that of a corpse, that is, none at all, and he grabs onto Tine’s hand tightly as he starts struggling.
“L-Let go of me!”
The handsome policeman skilfully takes the bottles of out of Tine’s jacket and places them on the counter, all the while keeping his vice-like grip on Tine. He dishes out some notes, and says something to the cashier, whose face remains schooled in an unagitated expression of boredom throughout the whole interaction, as if she bears witness to such scenes on a daily basis.
Tine tries to wring out the unexpectedly harsh grip and finds himself being dragged out of the convenience store, and he’s breathing hard, feeling his tummy rumble as he fights down the urge to puke. He collapses to his knees, letting out a retching sound, but he swallows his nausea back down when he feels the tight grip on his hand loosen, and suddenly there’s a rough palm on his forehead and his hair is being swept out of his eyes.
The action causes him to look up at the good-looking policeman, and he feels tears prick at the back of his eyes as he realises the severity of the situation he’s in.
“Well, what do we have here?” the man says it lowly, and Tine feels goosebumps erupt on the back of his neck as the words seem to slither across his skin.
“P-please, Sir,” Tine gasps out, and he doesn’t even know what he’s pleading for, but desperation settles in and he buries his pride as he reaches out and clings onto the man’s immaculate pants.
“You lied to me. I’m sure you’re aware that you’re not allowed to drink until you’re 20, aren’t you?”
“I’m t-turning 20 next week, Sir,” he stammers out. “Check.. Check my license, my birthday’s next week. Can’t you let me go, j-just this once, please? I swear I won’t drink--”
“You also stupidly attempted to shoplift two bottles of alcohol, knowing very well I was right there,” the man snorts, and Tine grits his teeth as the almost unbearable urge to sock the man in the face possesses him, but instead he grips the pant leg tighter and attempts to grovel his way out of this damning, cringe-inducing plight.
“Come on, dude! Fuck, my friends dared me to do this. Let me off the hook, just this once, p-please!” he hiccups. What he really wants to do as of this moment is holler out a string of expletives before marching off to his friends’ current location at the back of the convenience store and haul their asses towards the man. Tine knows they’re still drunk and chortling away merrily at nothing.
“Huh. For stealing alcohol? Underage drinking and lying to an officer?” the man tuts at Tine, who shrinks back in fear at the condescending lilt in his tone of voice.
He gulps and he stares up at the man, wide-eyed as he evaluates what little options he has left with his smashed brain.
Finally, he comes to the conclusion that he’s all out of ideas, so he arches his back and leans closer, face dangerously close to the man’s crotch.
Well, shit. Desperate times call for desperate measures. He knows that once he wakes up to a state of sobriety, he’d be banging his head against the wall for making such a horrifyingly bold, embarrassingly wanton move against a goddamn policeman. He doesn’t even know why he’s trying to sabotage and contradict his own character, given that he couldn’t seduce a brick wall (ie, this man), to save his own life. His inebriated self, having been enlightened from obstacles as trivial as his dignity, tries anyway.
“...I’ll do anything, officer,” he says in what he assumes to be an enticing and sensual tone, but it comes out as a barely coherent slur more than anything. His eyes droop, but not on purpose as he feels himself getting sleepier by the second.
“...Anything?” the policeman utters out after a long moment of silence.
He looks up to meet the man’s gaze, seeing the dangerous, excited glint in his eyes, and Tine bites his lip as he nods shyly.
The policeman smirks.
Inwardly, the tiny, still-lucid part of himself starts screaming.