What happens when you start to fall out of love with your husband? What happens when that husband is Kim Namjoon?
pairing: idol husband Namjoon x reader
tag / warnings: mild allusions to smut but very briefly and very much just about y/n remembering how things used to be, Namjoon’s long fingers and not much else.
author note: thank you to everyone who liked the preview!! I’m excited to continue wildflower and I hope you like this chapter!!
The descent down the elevator made my stomach churn. Yumi bounced up and down without a care in the world while I just stared blankly at the reflection in the elevator door. Who even was this person staring back at me? She was so unknown at this point. My life practically just consisted of being a single mother with the ever constant absence of my husband. I had no job to speak of, no career…no dream. Not anymore as that had long been given up in favor of Namjoon and his pursuit and career; his dream.
Thoughts raced through my head a mile a minute as the ding signaled that we were at our destination and as I began to walk Yumi to her preschool all I could think about was the man upstairs in our apartment. How much of myself had I given at this point? How much was there even left to give?
“Mommy!” My thoughts were interrupted by Yumi. My Yumi who looked so much like her father the older she got I was starting to get scared that no part of her would resemble me; the person who has cared for her more often than not.
“What love?” She was still so small and every fiber of my being felt like I needed to stay in the situation I was in just to appease her childhood and make it the most positive environment I could. But I was also starting to become so broken down at this point I wasn’t sure I could feel any kind of love or otherwise and that scared me above all. Who was I becoming? So callus and worn down that nothing, not even the return of my husband, could make me feel a positive emotion? He was, after all, the person that was supposed to do just that. Our life together had started off so great, so full, but now it was dying and at this point I was starting to let it.
“Aren’t you excited? Daddy’s home!” Excited was an extreme overstatement but I couldn’t exactly tell her that so I just smiled and beckoned her forward into the preschool doors. She was still enamored by her father and it broke my heart to think of him; no longer my Namjoon. He was such a stranger to me as he was never home and it terrified me to go back to the apartment and continue my normal routine. So much so that I walked the city for hours until it felt like blisters had found my feet and I could finally go back to collect Yumi. To my surprise and horror however, as I arrived back at her school, someone was already there waiting.
“Hey Love,” Frowning as my husband stood at my approach and smiled at me, I made sure to stop far enough out of his reach so that from a distance it looked as how I felt; that we were strangers to each other. “I thought I would surprise you both since you never came home.”
“Surprised indeed.” I continued to frown as he stood there; tall, broad, and totally handsome and so totally not mine. “I thought you didn’t even know where Yumi went to school.” Even though my words were seething he didn’t flinch like expected. Instead he beamed again and started to approach me.
“You don’t give me enough credit. Now,” He went to sling an arm around my shoulder and I flinched, moving away. He gave me a dark look but didn’t press on the matter and instead moved forward towards the door. “Let’s get our daughter.”
I paused in the inbetween - hanging completely. If I moved forward I would have to brush past him but if I stayed behind our daughter would be left waiting. Moving forward ever so slightly and slowly so that precious Yumi wouldn’t be left wondering where I was, Namjoon’s chest came in contact with my shoulder and as he moved forward he pressed hard against my back.
“Babe,” He said low and in my ear, sending chills up my spine. “Don’t look so disgusted. You’re mine after all.”
To say that Namjoon being around Yumi made her exuberant was an understatement and she always got this way when he came home, for however brief it may be. She was simply too overjoyed. Too young to understand that this was all just temporary. That this man, who used to be our Namjoon, was just going to leave again and in the process leave us behind; alone and waiting. He would go off like he always did; travel constantly, go and see the world, get showered by love and compliments by enamoured fans all the while we struggled silently because he wasn’t there to see our pain and comfort us. He wasn’t there to see the aftermath of devastated Yumi who demanded she slept in his spot until she felt okay again. He wasn’t there to help with the havoc he created just by being.
But I knew the truth about him.
How cruel he could be, how dark. How he monitored my friends and forbade me to become one with any other man that wasn’t in his inner circle. How he insisted that he have a tracker on my phone, even to monitor me when he was away. How he would ghost me for weeks at a time and later claim that it was all work, that things were too overwhelming and he just couldn’t deal with it and us all at the same time and he needed to prioritize. But then, watching all the content they would put out to appease little Yumi’s desire to see her father even when he was on the other side of the world and I couldn’t bear the thought of looking at him, I would catch glimpses of him having true fun and it would just make my skin crawl.
I couldn’t be happy for him, not anymore.
Not after all those times we needed him since he just reminded me of so many horrible things now. Not after that time Yumi had the flu and was puking and shivering and running the highest fever she had ever had and I cried myself to sleep once her fever broke and I could rest. Not when she was so small and tiny, in the hospital begging for her father as I sat there and tried to be both, tried to soothe her, tried anything I could to comfort our daughter and felt so terribly rejected every time she asked for Namjoon. Not when he was off somewhere filming, performing, enjoying his life without us.
“Love,” He interrupted my thoughts as I sat at the table with him long after Yumi went to bed. Namjoon actually took the time to play with her before shutting himself in his studio just in time for me to do all the ugly work of making her go to sleep. “You’re picking at your hands and they are starting to bleed. Stop,” He was so quick, so unbelievably quick, as he grabbed my hands and enveloped them in his massive ones. Long fingers curled around mind and he looked at me again; darkly. I knew what he was thinking in that moment but the last time he touched me like that, with those long fingers, was right after Yumi had been born. He was gone too often, smelt of different smells and not the Namjoon that I had grown to love when I was younger. He wasn’t the same. He had changed. “You shouldn’t do that you know. It makes me mad.”
When he looked at me it was still filled with a hunger I used to thrive on. Now though, he was so unbelievably different and no matter how familiar his touch at that moment felt like I had to remind myself of that as I exhaled the breath I didn’t know I had been holding, excused myself to the restroom and cried silently into a towel as I left Namjoon and his hungry gaze alone in the kitchen. Long ago, when I was a different person, I would have fed into the hungry gaze; let him ravage me and have total control. Now was so drastically different and even if he couldn’t understand why it didn’t matter because I knew. I was still crying and with Namjoon I was somehow always finding myself like that; broken and alone.
Later, when it was time to sleep and I had pulled myself out of the bathroom, I was so unbelievably relieved when the late night fell and he shut himself away in his studio. I would be able to get to sleep before he would come crawling into bed at whatever hour in the morning. At least then I wouldn’t have to deal with him. Brushing out my hair after scrubbing my face ragged so my eyes didn’t seem so puffy I began to really think.
The Namjoon who was idolized all over the world was just down the hall from me and I, the person who was married to the man that millions loved, would have rather been anywhere else at that moment.
Why? I couldn’t help but ponder.
Why was it that so much had changed between us?
Was it when he stopped bringing me flowers before he came back home no matter how long he was away for?
Was it when he missed the birth of our daughter because he was stuck in Japan for promotions and filming?
Was it when, after all of the events he missed, after all the nights that had gone by of sleeping alone, after all the firsts of Yumi’s gone unwitnessed, that I started to feel numb around him?
“Love,” Shocked, I jumped at the sound of his voice coming from the doorway. “How long have you been sitting there? It’s almost 1am.” Frowning I turned towards him. He stood there, looking like the most delicious thing I had ever laid my eyes on. If I wanted to I could let him have me, take total control and use me for whatever he wanted. But that woman had long been suppressed and instead there sat the woman who just shrugged, put her brush down and walked towards the right side of the bed to pretend to sleep so she could avoid talking to him.
“Goodnight,” I spoke softly, shutting the lamp off that sat on the bedside table next to me. In what felt like a different life that table used to be filled with photographs and memories long since past. Taken down in favor of an empty space and to appease my stomach so I never had to get nauseous looking at them again. There used to be pictures of us in Jeju long before I had become pregnant, us on our honeymoon in Italy, us in Paris at night right at the front of the Louvre all lit up behind us, us as an us long before the us became him and then me. Namjoon caught it though just before the darkness consumed us. Slipping into bed with me I felt him shift closer, his hand slink up my side, arm to envelope my stomach. He tugged lightly, trying to pull me closer in a nice way but I stubbornly laid planted, rooted to my spot.
“Tomorrow we’ll put the pictures back.” He said finally after I refused to move. “We’ll have breakfast like a family. You’ll take Yumi to school with me and after,” He sighed, a warm breath that reached the nape of my neck as he scooted closer to put his chest to my back for the second time that day. “You’ll be all mine.”
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