the favourite
Jobe Bellingham x Fem!Reader
sy: you unexpectedly run into your ex's brother at a party.
a/n: just a little something silly i wrote after watching an edit of him, i kinda let my imagination run wild lol. sorry if there are any writing or translation mistakes
You hadn't expected to see anyone you knew at this party.
That was precisely the appeal. A friday night in someone else's flat, in a part of the city you didn't frequent much, with people who belonged to circles adjacent to yours but that didn't overlap enough to create social obligations. The kind of party where you could exist without having to be the version of yourself that people had already catalogued. You were fine with that. You were, in fact, actively enjoying it, drink in hand and the music low enough to think, leaning against a wall near the window that looked out over the city lights below.
That was when you saw him.
Not Jude — that possibility you had evaluated and dismissed before walking in, with the practical coldness of someone who learned to locate emergency exits before needing them. The brother. Jobe. Younger, taller than you remembered from the last time you'd crossed paths with him in a family context you preferred not to revisit, with that smile that was familiar in a way that did strange work in your stomach.
He saw you at almost the same moment.
You watched the recognition move across his face, a small pause, a reorganisation of expectations, and then the smile that wasn't surprise but was something more deliberate than that. He was on the other side of the room and there were enough people between you that you could have looked away and pretended not to have noticed.
You didn't do that.
Not out of masochism — at least that's what you told yourself — but because Jobe Bellingham was coming in your direction with the specific energy of someone who isn't in a hurry because he knows he's going to get there regardless, and there was something in that which made you curious enough to stay where you were.
"I should have put money on it," he said when he was close enough to be heard over the music, his eyes moving over you in a way that was direct without being invasive. "That you'd be here tonight."
"You would have won," you said.
"I would have." He leaned against the wall beside you, not in front of you, which was a calculated choice you noticed and that he probably knew you'd notice. His profile settled into your peripheral vision, his jaw, the line of his neck, that resemblance that was undeniable and that you preferred to file in a mental folder labelled irrelevant for now. "It's been a while."
"It has," you agreed.
"You look good." It wasn't a question. It was an observation with a specific weight, the kind that stays suspended in the air waiting for you to decide what to do with it.
You turned your face slightly toward him. "Are you being polite or making an observation?"
His smile grew slowly, the kind that doesn't rush because it doesn't need to. "Both things can be true."
The music shifted to something lower, heavier, the kind of sound that exists specifically to create atmosphere in dark rooms, and you turned back to the window with your drink in hand trying not to let his proximity do more work than it should. Jobe was younger, he was the brother of someone who had been a considerable part of your life for a considerable amount of time, and there were at least three practical reasons why this conversation should stay exactly where it was.
You were cataloguing those reasons when he turned to look at you properly, his shoulder leaning lightly against yours — casual, could have been accidental, but you knew the difference between accident and intention.
"Can I tell you something?" he said, his voice low enough to be just yours in the middle of the party noise.
You looked at him. "Depends on the thing."
"You'll always be my favourite."
The silence that followed lasted exactly long enough for you to process that sentence and everything it carried. You felt the warmth before you could formulate a response, and the part of you that had come to this party with the intention of existing without complications was looking at the situation with an expression that said I warned you.
"What do you mean?" you said, because it was the only honest response.
Jobe looked at you for a second and then the smile appeared again, that specific smile that was simultaneously a shield and a confession.
"Sister in law," he said. "Favourite sister in law, obviously."
The word arrived wrapped in something that wasn't innocent, delivered with a look that didn't match the explanation accompanying it in any way, and you stood looking at him for a moment with the very clear awareness that he knew exactly what he was doing. That he'd said it one way first, and then another, and that the space between the two versions was entirely intentional.
You laughed — not because it was funny, but because it was the most honest response to a situation that didn't have a right answer. "You're terrible," you said.
"I'm honest," he corrected, and there was something in his tone that wasn't regret. "They're different things."
The party continued around you both with the usual indifference of parties. Someone laughing louder than necessary in a corner, the sound of ice in a glass, the music pulsing through the floor. Jobe was looking at you with that expression you couldn't quite classify, something between what he'd said and what he wasn't going to say, and you felt the weight of it like physical pressure in the space between you.
You pushed off from the wall. "I'm going to get another drink."
"I'll come with you."
"You don't need to."
"I know," he said, simply, and stayed where he was — which was, you realised as you walked away, perhaps the smartest thing he could have done. Not insisting. Not following. Just staying there with that smile and that look and the sentence that was going to stay in your head longer than it should.
You reached the makeshift bar in the kitchen and ordered something without quite knowing what you'd asked for, and stood for a moment with the glass in your hand looking at the surface of the drink with the very specific awareness that there were two versions of you in that moment: the one who was going to go back to the party and find other people and finish the night without complications, and the one who knew she was going to look back before leaving the kitchen.
You looked back.
He was exactly where you'd left him, leaning against the wall with his drink in hand, and when your eyes found his across the room he did nothing except smile — that small, very deliberate smile of someone who didn't need more than that.
You turned back to the bar.
There were at least three practical reasons why that conversation should have stayed exactly where it did.
You thought about them the whole way home.
