#jimin angst

[a-nyx-7]

HOME WAS YOU | PARK JIMIN

PART 1

Summary : Burnt out by the fast-paced life, you flee to your grandmother’s house in quiet Busan. You expected a summer alone, but running into Park Jimin, your childhood soulmate, changes everything. You never knew a simple life in the countryside would spark your soul, bring your inner child back, and lead you to the one place you truly belonged.

Tropes : childhood friends to lovers, small-town seaside setting, burnt-out city girl x happy country boy,healing & comfort, "i've loved you forever", soft ff, one side love, friends to lovers, childhood sweethearts.

Pairing: jimin x f.reader

Tags : @graydolan12

requested by : anon

⋆.˚𓇼

The silence in Seoul had never actually been silent.

It was always rushed kind of quiet—the quick elevator rides, the muted hum of passing cars seven floors down your small apartment, or the muffled sounds of your neighbor closing their front door at an ungodly hour. It was a silence filled with noise, reminding you that even while you slept, the city was still running.

This, however, was entirely different.

This quiet had crickets in it.

You sat on the warm, weather-worn wooden step of the maru outside your grandmother’s traditional hanok, your bare feet resting against the cool slate floor of the courtyard. The morning air was thick with the scent of dew-soaked earth, sweet pine, and wet grass. Somewhere just beyond the low stone walls of the yard.

A smile tugged at the corner of your lips.

The sun was taking its time, slowly bleeding shades of soft apricot and lavender over the mist-shrouded hills of Busan. You had almost forgotten that mornings could look like this. In the concrete jungle of the capital, a sunrise was just a blurred pastel streak caught out of the corner of your eye through a glass window, usually after an all-nighter spent staring at spreadsheets. It was never something you stopped for. It was never something you waited to watch.

Here, you had woken up before it—not to an aggressive phone alarm, not for a 7:00 AM meeting, and not to clear an overflowing inbox.

You had simply woken up.

And the sheer novelty of that simple fact felt almost unnatural.

Reaching down, you dipped your fingers into the small ceramic bowl beside you and picked up a dark purple grape. Your grandmother had washed them earlier, leaving them on the porch step for you, the skins still glistening with cool water droplets. You popped it into your mouth.

Sweet.

Closing your eyes, you let out a quiet breath.

It was almost absurd, really. It was just a grape. You had eaten hundreds of them at your sleek office desk in Seoul, absently popping them into your mouth while typing emails with one hand and reviewing documents with the other. You couldn't recall the taste of a single one.

But now, the flavor exploded on your tongue. You could hear the satisfying snap of the skin between your teeth. You could savor it, swallow, and then sit in the golden morning light doing absolutely nothing.

Maybe that was what years of relentless exhaustion had done to you. It hadn't made you hate your life—that would have been a much easier problem to fix. It had done something far more subtle. It had stripped away the color, turning every day into a series of hurdles to clear.

Mornings were something to survive.

Breakfast was a task to rush through.

Work was an endless queue to clear.

People were exhausting to manage.

How fast should I reply to this text? How carefully do I need to phrase this email so I don’t sound passive-aggressive? Did I disappoint them? Will my manager think I’m slacking off if I log off at six?

You had spent years sprinting in a race where no one had bothered to mark the finish line. And the most terrifying part was that everyone around you was sprinting, too, pretending it was entirely normal. So, you learned to run faster. You learned to plaster a bright, polite smile across your face while doing it. You learned to say, "I'm totally fine," so convincingly that some days, you almost fooled yourself.

A gentle morning breeze swept through the courtyard, rustling the leaves of the old persimmon tree.

"Are you planning on finishing off that entire bowl before the sun even hits the roof?"

You glanced over your shoulder. Your grandmother was standing in the doorframe, her faded floral apron tied neatly around her waist, arms folded as she surveyed you with an affectionate, knowing look.

"Good morning to you, too, Halmeoni," you murmured, offering a soft grin.

"It’s almost time for breakfast."

"I am eating breakfast."

"You're eating fruit."

"Fruit is a valid breakfast."

"Not under my roof, it isn't."

A lighthearted laugh escaped your chest. Shaking her head with a fondness she couldn't quite hide, your grandmother turned back into the house.

"Up. Come help me."

°

The kitchen was instantly smelling of toasted sesame oil, rich soybean paste broth, and warm rice. Golden sunlight poured through the traditional paper windows, bathing the worn wood floors in a deep honey glow. Neatly organized bowls of fresh vegetables lined the wooden counter.

Tying your hair back into a loose bun, you stepped up beside her. "What's on the menu?"

"Whatever you actually know how to make without burning down the house."

You blinked at her. "That doesn't inspire much confidence in me."

"Then stand there and learn." She pushed a large bowl of crisp green spinach toward you. "Wash this."

Turning on the tap, you let the icy water run over your hands. It felt startlingly real against your skin. You watched out of the corner of your eye as your grandmother moved around the small space with the graceful, unhurried rhythm of someone who had prepared this exact meal thousands of times. She sliced radish with practiced precision, seasoned the fresh fish, checked the bubbling pot, and adjusted the heat, all without a single rushed movement.

"Halmeoni?"

"Hmm?"

"How do you do all of this without feeling like you're in a rush?"

She paused, glancing at you over her shoulder. "What kind of question is that?"

"I mean... you just do things. Calmly."

A tiny smile crinkled the corners of her eyes. "Things don't have legs, Y/N-ah. They don't run away."

You let out a soft sigh. "That's not always true."

"Work runs away?" she asked.

"No."

"People?"

"Sometimes."

"Deadlines?"

"Definitely."

She set her heavy wooden knife down on the cutting board with a soft thud and turned to face you fully.

"Then let them run."

You froze, looking at her.

She held your gaze for a long moment before simply turning back to her vegetables.

"You can't catch everything in this world, child. You'll break your own legs trying."

The silence settled over the kitchen again, soft and broken only by the comforting sounds of cooking.

You looked down at the spinach submerged in the clear water, the coldness seeping into your fingertips.

"I think..." Your voice dropped, small and vulnerable. "I think I spent a really long time trying to catch everything."

"I know." Her voice was soft, devoid of judgment.

You swallowed past the sudden tightness in your throat. "I thought if I just worked a little harder, stayed up a little later, took on one more project... I’d finally feel like I made it. Like I was finally good enough."

"And do you feel that way?"

You shook your head slowly, a heavy weight lifting off your chest just by admitting it aloud. "No. I just feel hollow."

Your grandmother didn't offer a pitying look or a lecture. Instead, she gently took the bowl from your hands, setting it aside.

"Then perhaps," she said softly, wiping her hands on her apron, "you've just been climbing the wrong hill all this time."

A quiet tearful laugh slipped past your lips. "That's pretty philosophical for seven in the morning."

"I've earned every grey hair on my head," she replied with a sharp wink. "I'm allowed to be wise." She tapped the rim of the bowl. "Now wash those properly."

"Yes, ma'am."

For the next twenty minutes, no words were needed. You rinsed the greens until the water ran perfectly clear. She stirred the savory broth. The electric rice cooker let out its chime in the corner.

Outside, the morning breeze whistled through the pine trees, carrying the faint, distant melody of ocean waves crashing along the Busan coastline.

Suddenly, a golden-brown piece of fresh fried tofu appeared right in front of your face.

"Eat."

You blinked, looking from the tofu to your grandmother. "I thought you said fruit wasn't real breakfast and we had to wait."

"It isn't."

"Then why are you feeding me?"

She insisted.

"Halmeoni, I'm fine—"

"You need to enjoy little treats while you are working. Even if the work is as simple as cooking for yourself."

Unable to fight the warmth blooming in your chest, you took the piece of tofu and bit into it. It was hot, perfectly crispy on the outside, rich and savory on the inside.

Your grandmother turned back to the stove, a small smile gracing her face. "You know... when you were seven years old, you used to stand in that exact same spot and steal food right off the cutting board before I could even set the table."

You looked down at the wooden floor beneath your feet, "I did?"

"You did," she murmured, her tone softening. "You haven't changed as much as you think you have."

You swallowed the bite, feeling the knots in your shoulders finally begin to uncoil.

Not all at once. The exhaustion of years couldn't be washed away in a single morning.

But enough.

Enough to take a clear breath.

Enough to realize that coming back here was the first right decision you had made in a very long time.

°

The old bicycle was still there.

You found it tucked away behind the house, half-hidden beneath the heavy, leafy shade of the ancient persimmon tree. It was leaning heavily against the moss-covered wooden fence as though it had been patiently waiting, for years, just for you to finally remember it.

The metal frame was a faded, washed-out robin’s-egg blue, its once-vibrant paint chipped away in delicate patterns to reveal tiny patches of rust near the pedals. The rubber grip on the left handlebar had rotted away completely, and the wicker basket in the front hung slightly crooked. When you reached out and hesitantly pressed the bell, it chimed loudly.

"You're still alive," you murmured under your breath.

You ran your palm down the sun-warmed metal of the handlebars. Remarkably, so were you.

Wheeling it out from the shadows into the bright morning light, you checked the tires with the toe of your shoe. They were a bit soft, giving slightly under the pressure, but not enough to stop you. You hadn't ridden a bike in years—not since high school, certainly never in the chaotic, traffic-choked streets of Seoul—but something about seeing it resting there made your chest ache with the sudden urge to try.

Maybe it was the crisp morning air.

Maybe it was the heavy silence of the countryside.

Or maybe, deep down, you simply wanted to know what it felt like to go somewhere without needing a reason, a GPS route, or a scheduled appointment.

You swung your leg over the frame and pushed off.

The first few meters were embarrassingly clumsy. The front wheel wobbled wildly, and you had to put a foot down to keep from tumbling sideways into the dirt path.

Then, muscle memory took over. Your body remembered what your mind had long forgotten.

Your hands loosened their white-knuckled grip on the handles. Your feet found a smooth, effortless rhythm against the pedals, and suddenly, the gravel road began to slip away beneath your tires.

An incredulous laugh escaped your lips.

The narrow road outside your grandmother's hanok curved gently through the village, flanked by low stone walls and open fields washed in the soft golden sunlight of early morning. Dewdrops glinted like scattered glass on the grass, and green leaves trembled in the canopy overhead. Somewhere nearby, the wooden shutters of a small corner grocery creaked open. A sleepy farm dog barked once from a yard and then lazily gave up.

You kept pedaling, picking up speed.

The farther you rode, the more the tangled thoughts in your head began to unspool. The sea breeze came rushing to meet you, cool as it swept over your skin. It tangled your hair, whipping loose strands across your eyes, but you didn't even care to push them away.

You didn't need to look presentable here. There was no one watching. No performance to put on.

No meetings.

No deadlines.

No blue-light screen glowing in your palm with urgent notifications.

Just you. The bicycle. And the open road beneath the summer sky.

When the narrow path finally broke through the tree line and the ocean burst into view, you instinctively slowed down.

Blue.

An endless, blinding expanse of deep sapphire that made your breath hitch in your throat. The water stretched all the way to the sharp line of the horizon, glittering as if millions of diamonds were floating on the surface under the morning sun. Far out on the water, tiny white fishing boats bobbed lazily in the tide.

You smiled, a full, involuntary smile that reached all the way to your eyes. You couldn't even remember the last time you had smiled simply because you were happy to exist in a moment.

Pedaling slowly along the coastal road, the sea stayed right beside you like an old friend. Every few seconds, a stronger gust of wind would sweep in off the waves, lifting your hair off your shoulders and cooling your warm skin. You closed your eyes for half a second, inhaling the sharp, clean scent of salt and ozone.

You felt lighter.

Not fixed. Not suddenly, magically cured of the exhaustion that had hollowed you out in Seoul.

Just... lighter. And maybe, for a quiet Tuesday morning in Busan, that was more than enough.

You were just beginning to understand what your grandmother had meant earlier in the kitchen. Some things didn't need to be solved. Some things just needed to be felt.

You were still lost in that thought when the bicycle gave a harsh jerk. The pedals suddenly spun uselessly beneath your feet, locking up with a sharp clatter.

"What the...?"

You braked hard, dragging your sneakers across the gravel to bring the bike to a stop.

You looked down. The black, greasy chain had completely slipped off the gears, dangling uselessly against the back wheel.

You stared at it in disbelief, letting out a heavy, exasperated groan. "Are you serious right now?"

Crouching down in the dirt beside the bike, you pinched the cold metal chain between your fingers, trying to loop it back onto the teeth of the sprocket. It snapped back out of place instantly.

You tried again, pressing harder, but it slipped once more, leaving thick, black bicycle grease smeared across your palm and fingers.

"Come on," you muttered, your frustration rising.

You were just about to throw your hands up and push the heavy bike all the way back up the hill when a soft, hesitant voice cut through the sound of the crashing waves behind you.

"Y/n?"

Your hands froze over the iron chain.

The sound of the wind seemed to drop out completely, leaving the world suspended in a strange stillness.

Slowly, almost afraid that your mind was playing tricks on you, you lifted your head and stood up.

Standing just a few meters away on the coastal path, holding his own bicycle by the handlebars, was a young man.

Messy wavy dark hair fluttered gently in the sea breeze, casting soft shadows across his sharp jawline. He was wearing a simple jacket. But it was the way he stood—that familiar, gentle posture—that made your heart leap into your throat before your brain could even process who he was.

He was staring at you. Really staring.

For a long, agonizing second, neither of you said a word. The long years, the distance, the endless miles between Seoul and Busan seemed to evaporate in the small space between your eyes meeting.

The boy who used to race you down this exact coastal road until your lungs burned.

The boy who used to slyly steal the sweetest peaches out of your lunchbox when you weren't looking.

The boy who always knew when you were crying, even when you hid your face and swore up and down that you were fine.

The boy you had once naively believed would always be a constant in your life, right up until the day you packed your bags for the city.

Jimin.

His expression shifted first. The stunned disbelief in his dark eyes melted, giving way to an overwhelming softness. It was a look so raw, so full of unspoken history, that it felt as though he had imagined this exact coincidence a thousand times over and couldn't quite trust that you were actually standing in front of him.

"Y/n-ah...?" he whispered again, his voice lower this time, almost fragile.

You swallowed past the sudden lump in your throat, your heart hammering against your ribs.

"Jimin."

Saying his name felt like pulling a warm, forgotten memory out of the dark.

Then, his lips curved. It started small and uncertain at the corners, before blooming into the exact same warm, crescent-eyed smile you had kept tucked away in your heart for years. The smile from summers that had once felt like they would last forever.

And suddenly, as the summer wind swept past you both, the ocean didn't seem quite as vast as it had a moment ago.

Jimin took a step forward, the surprise in his eyes giving way to that familiar, crooked smile. He set his own bicycle against the wooden guardrail before walking over to where you stood, your fingers still coated in black chain grease.

"Some things really never change, do they?" he said, his voice carrying the rich, warm cadence of the south. He gestured toward your greasy hands with a quiet chuckle. "You still can't handle a chain to save your life."

"Hey," you protested, though there was zero bite to it. "This bike is older than both of us combined."

"Fair point."

He crouched down beside the rear wheel without a second thought, completely unbothered by the dirt on the road. Watching him from above felt surreal. The boy who used to scrape his knees climbing trees with you was now a young man with broad shoulders, gentle hands, and a calm, grounded presence that seemed to instantly settle the air around you.

With practiced ease, Jimin guided the greasy metal chain back onto the teeth of the gear, giving the pedal a quick backward spin until it clicked back into place with a satisfying snap.

"There," he said, wiping his thumb against his jeans as he stood up. "Fixed. Though if you take it up the steep hill near the lighthouse, it's going to drop again."

"Thank you, Jimin-ah," you murmured softly.

He looked at you then, his eyes searching your face with an quiet intensity that made your breath catch. Up close, the tender light in his eyes was almost overwhelming.

"You look tired, Y/n-ah," he said gently, skipping the superficial pleasantries. It wasn't a critique; it was an observation filled with pure concern. "Real tired."

You looked down at your shoes, the quiet honesty of his words hitting a nerve you’d been trying to numb for months. "Seoul was... a lot."

"I figured." Jimin reached out, his hand hovering for a second before he lightly nudged your shoulder with his own. "Come on. Let's walk for a bit. You don't have to talk about it if you don't want to."

Instead of riding, the two of you walked side-by-side along the coastal path, pushing your bicycles along the gravel. The crashing of the waves against the rocks below provided a soothing backdrop to the silence between you—a silence that, unlike in the city, felt comfortable and entirely unhurried.

"I missed the ocean," you admitted quietly, watching the sunlight dance across the water. "In Seoul, everything moves so fast. If you stop to breathe for even a second, it feels like you're falling behind. I was running all the time, Jimin. And I didn't even know what I was running toward."

Jimin listened intently, his head tilted slightly toward you as you spoke.

"You know," he said softly, his voice carrying over the sound of the wind, "when you left for the city, I wondered how long you'd be able to keep up with a place like that. Not because you aren't strong—you're the strongest person I know. But because your heart wasn't built for a place that forgets how to slow down."

You stopped walking, looking over at him in surprise.

Jimin turned to face you, offering a small, reassuring smile. "It's okay to rest, Y/N. Coming back here isn't a failure. It just means you needed to remember who you were before the world told you who to be."

The words settled deep in your chest, loosening a knot of guilt you hadn't even realized you were carrying. A laugh escaped you, tears prickling at the corners of your eyes. "When did you get so wise?"

"I had a lot of time to think while tending to plants," he teased gently, his crescent-eyed smile blooming again. He gestured up the winding road ahead. "Speaking of which... come home with me. My parents would lock me out if they found out I bumped into you and didn't bring you over."

°

The sight of Jimin’s family property brought a wave of nostalgia that made your throat tight.

It hadn't changed at all. Nestled at the foot of the hill overlooking the sea sat the double-story building, on the ground floor, the cozy, bustling family restaurant, and right beside it, spilling out into a sunlit courtyard, was the vibrant flower greenhouse run by his mother.

As children, this place had been your second home. Whenever your grandmother was busy working late, you had practically lived here—sleeping over on the living room floor with Jimin, building blanket forts, and stealing sweet rice cakes from the kitchen counter.

"Eomma! Look who I found!" Jimin called out as you both walked up the paved path.

A woman with soft features and an apron dusted with dirt stepped out from the glass doors of the greenhouse, wiping her hands on a towel. The moment her eyes landed on you, her face lit up with absolute warmth.

"Oh, my goodness... Y/N-ah?!"

Before you could even speak, she hurried over, wrapping you in a motherly embrace that smelled faintly of soil, fresh lavender, and warm sunshine. You melted into the hug instantly, your arms wrapping around her waist.

"Look at you... you're so pale!" she pulled back, gently cupping your face with hands that were warm and calloused. "Your grandmother told me you were coming back for the summer, but I didn't expect to see you so soon. Come inside! You're staying for dinner. I won't take no for an answer."

"Eomma, let her breathe," Jimin laughed, though his eyes were crinkled with fondness as he watched the interaction.

"Quiet, Jimin. Go tell your father to put extra pork in the stew," she ordered playfully before guiding you inside the cozy interior of the restaurant.

From the kitchen, Jimin's father poked his head out, his face breaking into a wide, familiar grin the moment he saw you. "Y/N! Welcome home, kiddo! Just in time—lunch is almost ready!"

Sitting at the wooden table in the back corner—the exact same table where you and Jimin used to do your elementary school homework—you felt a sense of safety wrap around you like a heavy blanket.

Within twenty minutes, the table was piled high with steaming dishes, grilled fish, savory pancakes, fresh kimchi, and a rich, bubbling pot of stew.

You reached out to spoon some of the stew into your bowl, but before your spoon could touch the pot, Jimin’s hand gently caught your wrist.

"Wait," he said softly.

He took your bowl from you, dipped the ladle into the pot, and carefully served you a generous portion of meat, tofu, and broth—making sure not a single piece of mushroom landed in your bowl.

You stared at the dish in surprise. "Jimin..."

"You still pick around mushrooms like they're toxic, don't you?" he asked, a knowing glint in his dark eyes as he placed the bowl back in front of you.

"I... yeah. I do."

"I made sure jimin's father didn't put any cucumber in the side dishes either," his mother added, placing a plate of freshly fried chicken in front of you with a sweet smile. "I know how much you hate the texture."

You sat there, staring at the spread of food prepared so thoughtfully around a childhood dislike you hadn't even thought about in years. In Seoul, you had spent years ordering lunch for entire teams, remembering everyone else's coffee preferences, dietary restrictions, and schedules—while no one ever thought to ask about yours.

Here, in this noisy, sunlit restaurant by the sea, people remembered.

They remembered that you hated mushrooms.

They remembered that you liked your tofu extra crispy.

They remembered you.

A tear slipped down your cheek before you could stop it, splashing softly against the wooden table.

"Hey..." Jimin lowered his chopsticks immediately, his tone shifting into pure tenderness. He leaned in closer, his thumb instinctively reaching out to brush the tear away from your cheek with a gentle, feather-light touch. "What's wrong? Did I get it wrong?"

"No," you shook your head, wiping your eyes with the back of your hand and letting out a watery, laughter-laced breath. "No, you got it completely right. It's just... I forgot what it felt like."

"What what felt like?" he asked quietly, his eyes searching yours with unreserved affection.

"To be looked after," you whispered, looking around the table at his parents, who were watching you with gentle smiles, and finally back at Jimin. "To feel like I actually belong somewhere."

Jimin’s hand lingered near yours on the table, his fingers gently brushing against your knuckles.

"You've always belonged here, Y/N-ah," he said softly, his voice steady and deeply sincere. "No matter how far you go, this is always home. And we're always here.”

°

The night air was cool, smelling of sea salt and damp leaves, filled with the soft chorus of crickets and the distant rhythm of crashing waves. You sat shoulder-to-shoulder with Jimin on the edge of the wooden porch, two green bottles of Soju resting between you, their smooth glass glinting in the faint amber light of the lantern overhead.

"I still can't believe you," you said, taking a small sip straight from the bottle and letting out a soft laugh. "You were absolute terrified of anything with more than four legs. Remember that giant beetle in the garden?"

Jimin groaned, hiding his face in his hands as his shoulders shook with quiet laughter. "Y/N, that thing was the size of my fist. It had horns!"

"It was a harmless stag beetle!" you giggled, nudging his knee with yours. "You screamed like a little girl and hid behind me while I picked it up with a leaf to move it. I was your little bodyguard."

"Okay, fine," he admitted, looking up through his bangs with a grin that made your heart do a strange, familiar flutter. "You were brave. But let’s not pretend you were fearless."

"Hey! I was!"

"Oh really?" Jimin tilted his head, his voice dropping into a softer, more reflective tone. "What about the time you ran away from home in middle school? After your grandmother scolded you for that math exam?"

You froze for a second, a rush of memory flooding back before a soft, incredulous chuckle escaped you. "Oh God. I completely forgot about that."

"I didn't," Jimin murmured softly, looking down at his hands. "You were gone for hours. The sun had set, and it started pouring."

"I remember!" You nodded, the warm buzz of the Soju making your smile turn fond and nostalgic. "You came searching for me in the rain, didn't you? Found me hiding under the old bus stop shelter. You were all drenched, from head to toe, holding that silly yellow umbrella over me instead of yourself."

You picked up your bottle, realizing it was completely empty, and set it down with a soft clink against the porch floor. You looked over at him, the mellow night air and the comfort of his presence loosening the heavy knot that had lived in your chest for years.

"Now that I think about it," you whispered, your voice carrying a rare, raw sincerity, "you were always saving me, Jimin-ah. You were my superhero back then. Whenever things went wrong, you were always right there to protect me."

Jimin’s soft smile slowly faded.

For a fraction of a second, something heavy and achingly tender flickered across his face—a look so profound it made the air between you feel suddenly still. But before you could make sense of it, he quickly covered it with a light, breathless laugh and stood up from the porch step.

"You're drunk," he teased gently, though his voice sounded slightly tighter than before. He turned toward you and offered his hand. "Come on. It's getting late, and your grandmother will kill me if I bring you home stumbling."

"I am not drunk," you protested, though your head was pleasantly light.

You reached out and placed your hand in his. His palm was warm, solid, and larger than you remembered.

Jimin gave a gentle tug to help you up, but your foot caught slightly on the edge of the wooden step. You lost your balance, slipping forward with a soft gasp.

Instantly, Jimin’s other hand shot out, wrapping securely around your waist to catch you.

The momentum pulled you straight against his chest.

Everything went dead silent.

The distance between you vanished. You could feel the warmth of his body, the firm hold of his hand on your waist, and the sudden, rapid thrum of his heartbeat against his ribs.

Jimin tensed instantly.

He didn't step back. He didn't let go. He just stood there, completely rigid, holding you close enough that you could feel his warm breath against your cheek.

Slowly, you tilted your head up.

His eyes were wide, dark, and searching, completely stripped of their playful glint. Up close, under the faint golden glow of the lantern, you could see the tiny flecks of gold in his dark irises, the slight parting of his lips, and the intense gaze fixed entirely on you. It wasn't the way a childhood friend looked at you. It was the look of a man who had been holding his breath for years.

Your mind went completely blank. You got entirely lost in his eyes, your hand lingering against the cotton of his shirt over his chest, feeling the rhythm beneath your palm.

He wasn't just my superhero, a quiet, terrifying realization whispered in the back of your mind.

Your heart hammered against your ribs like a trapped bird.

Jimin’s hand slid reluctantly from your waist, his fingers twitching slightly before falling back to his side.

"I..." You cleared your throat, nervously tucking a loose strand of hair behind your ear, suddenly unable to meet his gaze. "I should... probably head back. Halmeoni's probably waiting."

Jimin swallowed, his throat moving as he forced his composure back into place.

"Yeah," he said softly, his voice lower than usual as he looked at you with an affection he could no longer fully hide. "Let's get you home.”

°

The wooden door of the old storeroom creaked open, releasing a haze of dust that danced in the dim light streaming through the door.

It smelled of dried lavender, aged paper, and time long gone.

You knelt on the wooden floorboards, gently shifting aside cardboard boxes of old school supplies until your hand brushed against a heavy, velvet-bound photo album. Dusting off the cover, you opened it on your lap.

The first page was a photograph of your parents.

They were young, smiling brightly against a backdrop of blooming cherry blossoms, looking back at the camera with so much life in their eyes. A lump instantly formed in your throat, a sharp, familiar ache tightening in your chest.

You traced the outline of your mother’s face with a thumb.

A memory rushed into your head.

~

It was the first anniversary of the accident.

You had snapped. The pity in the adults' eyes, the quiet whispers, the suffocating stillness of your grandmother’s house—it had all pushed you over the edge. You had run until your chest burned, collapsing onto the muddy grass of the open village field, letting the rain wash over you while you screamed into the open sky, missing your parents so deeply it felt like dying.

A few steps away, a twelve-year-old Jimin stood rooted to the spot.

He didn't try to pull you up. He didn't tell you it was going to be okay, because even at twelve, he knew that would be a lie. Instead, he just stood there in the mud, refusing to take a single step toward the dry shelter of the trees.

The rain stuck his dark hair to his forehead, soaking through his shirt. He was shivering violently, his teeth chattering from the cold wind sweeping off the ocean, but he refused to leave your side.

Looking at your small, shaking shoulders hunched over in the grass, tears flooded Jimin’s eyes, mixing hot against the freezing rain on his cheeks. He wasn't crying because he was cold, or because he was scared of the storm.

He was crying because your heart was broken, and his wasn't big enough yet to fix it.

So he just stood in the downpour, crying silently with you, anchored right there so that whenever you finally looked up, you would know you weren't carrying the storm entirely alone.

~

You remembered running away from the house during the heavy storm right after the funeral. You had collapsed in the middle of the open village ground, the downpour drenching your clothes, your tears mixing helplessly with the rain as you screamed into the thunder.

And then, the rain had stopped hitting your face.

You remembered looking up through blurred vision to find a twelve-year-old Jimin standing over you, holding a large blue umbrella. He was shivering violently, his own clothes soaked to the bone because he had held the umbrella entirely over you. He hadn't said a word. He had just sat down in the mud beside you, pulled you into his arms, and held you while you sobbed until you had no tears left.

He had stayed with you in that open field for hours under the torrential rain.

He was always there. Somehow, through every storm of your life, Jimin had been the anchor holding you to the earth.

A single tear slipped down your cheek, landing softly on the plastic sleeve of the album. You wiped your face with your sleeve, taking a deep, shaky breath, letting the past settle back into its quiet corner.

Reaching deeper into the box, your fingers caught on the edge of a worn, pastel-pink notebook with a frayed ribbon marker.

Your old middle school diary.

A tearful laugh escaped your lips as you flipped it open. The pages were a disastrously embarrassing archive of dramatic teenage angst: angry complaints about pop quizzes, furious rants about your grandmother making you eat carrots, and over-the-top declarations that your life was ruined because of a bad haircut.

You turned another page, and your breath hitched.

It was a full spread featuring two faded watercolor handprints—one smaller, neatly painted in yellow, and one slightly larger, smudged around the edges in blue.

Beneath the handprints, written in childish handwriting with a blue ballpoint pen.

We promise to stay best friends forever. And if we are not married by 28, we will marry each other so we don't end up lonely with cats.

- Signed, Y/N & Jimin

You stared at the page, a smile spreading across your face.

Twenty-eight.

You turned twenty-eight last year.

The memory of last night flashed in your mind—the heavy silence on the porch, the beat of his heart against your hand when he held you.

Your heart did a chaotic flip.

Impulsively, before you could talk yourself out of it, you whipped out your phone. You adjusted the lightning, clicked a clear photo of the worn diary page, and opened your chat with Jimin.

You attached the image and typed out a quick, playful message.

[Photo Attached]

Y/N: "So, when are you marrying me then?"

You hit send.

The gray checkmark immediately turned into Read.

For three long seconds, nothing happened. Then, the little text bubble appeared.

Jimin is typing...

It disappeared.

A/n : this two shot was requested by an anon but I recently finished watching 'Welcome to Samdal-ri' and it inspired me to write this healing story. Love that waits even after departure. i also wrote an essay about healing and love on substack. If you are interested to read, here's the link : Eassay

I was dying to write a slow and healing story that happens without any plot. Just life 🥹.

[jimilter]

on the borderline — 06 | pjm.

Park Jimin has been your buoy, your anchor and the ship of sanity that guides you to shore amid storms of self-doubt, nearly all your life; as have you been his. That is not to say nothing has ever brewed beneath the surface of platonic friendship, or that the two of you have never been victims to mistiming. Regardless, you would never risk the friendship you have with him now for anything. Even if you have to hurt him – or even yourself – in the process.

pairing: jimin x reader

rating: m (18+)

genre: angst | drama | friends to lovers!au

word count: 10.8 k

— warnings: swearing + mentions/references of sex + mentions of a past toxic relationship + mentions of therapy/therapists + allusions to emotional manipulation + commitment issues final boss + implications of unhealthy emotional attachment + stupid sad gorl reader :( + stupid sad boi jimi :(

— note: hellooo world! i have come back from the land of the dead and i come bearing gifts!!! this one is just elongation of, sad, sadder, saddest from one end to the other - so if you wanna have a good cry with some tummy twisting angst? grab some ice cream and dive in! (:

ps. the rating, genre and warnings mentioned above pertain to this chapter, only.

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𝐕𝐈 ⇢ 𝐓𝐖𝐎 𝐇𝐀𝐋𝐕𝐄𝐒 𝐎𝐅 𝐀 𝐖𝐇𝐎𝐋𝐄 𝐇𝐄𝐀𝐑𝐓 ♪ trying to find the truth, but sometimes our heart is deceiving

Life has become... strange, lately.

Not in any dramatic, earth-shattering way. The world hasn't stopped spinning, your boss hasn’t been abducted by aliens, your apartment hasn't suddenly grown haunted—everything is exactly how it has always been. And yet…it feels like nothing really is, anymore.

There's a quiet wrongness that’s been hanging over every single one of your days—a tiny shift in the axis of your routine that you can't seem to correct.

It's almost embarrassing, really. Because if anyone were to ask, you'd have to admit that you and Jimin have only become this inseparable for a few months.

Sure, you've always been close. Ridiculously close, according to literally everyone who has ever met the two of you. But this constant communication? The endless calls, the good morning texts, the updates about absolutely nothing? The random video calls while one of you folded laundry, the updates about what you were having for lunch, the late-night rants about work or existential crises... those were all relatively new additions to your friendship. 

Which means you lived perfectly fine without it before.

Didn’t you?

You prop your chin on your palm, staring blankly at your boss’ email open on your work laptop, detailing the tiny elements he needs added to the advertising workshop that’s finally happening tomorrow after multiple delays. You look at the last sentence.

PSA: We have pushed it back an entire month, so there isn’t any room for mistakes now. No stone should be left unturned on perfecting the event. (Do not respond to this mail; direct all queries to the Sales Manager.)

You need to tell your boss and CC all involved parties that Jackie, your Senior Sales Exec, has taken the lead in organising everything so they should actually direct all queries to her, but you keep losing focus.

The cursor in the reply box blinks at you. You blink back.

Your fingers hover over the keyboard as your thoughts drift away—back to that morning which feels to be a lifetime ago.

Rest assured that this won’t affect our friendship. I promise.

Jimin had said it so easily…so confidently.

We are way beyond ruining our friendship.

You'd believed him. You’d hoped to God that he’d be right.

So you'd done exactly what the two of you had agreed on. You'd swallowed every embarrassing feeling that cropped up after he left your apartment. You'd gone on your date with Seokjin despite wanting to cancel. You'd convinced yourself that your stupid Jimin-related butterflies would disappear if you just ignored them long enough.

So you'd disregarded the way your stomach flipped at every text he sent you. Put distance between you two by telling him you were seeing Seokjin regularly. Actually saw Seokjin regularly so you’d have something else to occupy your head. 

You told yourself that your crush-like feelings would pass—the way they have, in the past—and you’d be back to being friends with Jimin the way you both intend to be. The way you’d basically promised each other to be.

But while Jimin was on that trip, you spiraled further and further to the point where you began to almost hope that everything won’t be normal after Jimin came back. That he won’t be unbothered, either.

And when he confronted you about Seokjin—about your half-truths and made-up feelings—you wanted it to be a confrontation born out of discomfort. Out of jealousy. Not plain old well-wishing friendship that you two had always shared. You had mammoth butterflies flapping their wings against all of your insides at the very thought—you could see yourself on your way to going against what you’d both agreed upon. What the hell were you supposed to do if not employ immediate damage control the only way you saw fit?

You tried to test the waters—asked him why he was concerned about your relationship status with Seokjin. If he was just being a concerned friend or if he was dealing with his own version of visceral butterflies, too. 

Even though the notion scared you to death, you hoped it would be the latter.

You are the one who went wrong. You contradicted yourself. You lied to yourself. On one hand, you were terrified of the implication of not being able to move on from the night you spent with your best friend because you really couldn’t afford to risk Jimin’s place in your life. While on the other hand, you didn’t like that he had seemingly moved on and didn’t seem bothered by it as much as you.

So when Jimin showed you that he was still the friend he had promised and reassured you that he would be—over tamagayoki and fetish jokes—you couldn’t accept that. But instead of letting him in and telling him where you stood emotionally—

You tried to turn the tables on him by asking him to forget that night and get a girlfriend so that the two of you can move on in your respective romantic lives without creating any more mess. 

The whole conversation had spiralled so quickly after that. You kept wondering if it was really so wrong of you to want him to date someone? Wouldn’t that help?

You got your answer when he texted you, later that night, with some lame apology, some incorrect assumptions and a reassurance that left a bad taste in your mouth.

01:51 AM | Text Message from Min 🌟 I’m sorry I left like that Jetlag + work stress made me act out and say things I didn’t mean Also, dw I won’t stress u out with our pact I thought abt it and I realise that it concerns u that you’re moving ahead romantically while I’m left behind So I’ve decided to get back into the dating market It’s been a while but it’s high time I did, ig Get some sleep and text me when u feel better!

You felt hollow when you read all that. So you replied by thanking him for understanding. He responded with a wink emoji, and… that has basically been it. 

It’s been nearly a month since, and you haven’t met, haven’t face-timed, haven’t talked on a call — have barely texted.

With all your fears of preventing things from changing—you’ve changed everything yourself.

And now you’re living with this weighted radio silence from the one constant buzzing noise in your life.

You think back to the years before your daily calls became a habit, trying to convince yourself that you’re overthinking this. Surely, there had been a time when you weren't expecting your phone to buzz with another one of his stupid observations every hour?

But the more you think about it, the more you realise that it’s not just about keeping in touch. Jimin has always occupied an absurd amount of space in your mind—and your life.

You remember being nineteen, crossing campus after a particularly awful lecture, wondering if Jimin had finally gathered the courage to confess to that girl he'd spent the past week agonising over. You remember seeing a crazy poster and instinctively taking a picture because Jimin would laugh at this. You remember hearing songs, watching terrible movies, finding bizarre memes and mentally filing them away for your next conversation with him.

The constant communication may be recent, but your habit of thinking about Jimin has existed long before that.

Maybe that's why everything feels so... empty.

With a sigh, you minimize the email window and instinctively reach for your phone. Your thumb finds Jimin's chat before your brain even catches up.

No new messages.

You stare at the conversation anyway. The last thing he'd sent you was from two nights ago. 

Text Message from Min 🌟 Of course. See you there (:

Such a dry-ass response. 

If someone had shown you that message a month ago and claimed it came from Park Jimin, you would've laughed in their face. This is the same man who could turn a simple yes into four voice notes, three emojis and an unnecessary anecdote about a kitten he'd seen on the way to work. 

Now you get a smiley face.

Smiley face.

You should frame the damn thing.

You'd almost texted back: who are you and what have you done with my dramatic loser

Instead, you'd reacted with a thumbs-up like a dumbass.

You lock your phone. Then unlock it again. Then lock it again.

God. Life's so weird without Jimin. You’ve had him since you met him, nearly fifteen years ago. You don’t know how to cope with this absence.

You think back. Eighth standard. He annoyed you so relentlessly that you'd once threatened to throw his entire schoolbag into the boys' washroom. He laughed. You actually did throw it. He laughed harder.

Idiot.

Then somewhere along the way the annoyance became familiarity. Familiarity became comfort. Comfort became—

Well. A stupid little crush, for a while, that you'd carried around for months before beating it to death with common sense.

And then, finally—

Friendship. Real friendship. The kind that survives distance. The kind that survives heartbreaks. The kind that survives years. The kind you don't ever want to lose. Ever.

Which makes the current situation feel even more absurd, because why has he suddenly gone missing from your life?

Well. It’s all on you. You gave him a push and now he's keeping his distance.

Not completely, though! Just… enough. Enough that every interaction feels measured. Careful. Professional. As though somewhere between best friend and stranger, he's found a brand-new category for you, one that hurts more than either extreme ever could.

You want to blame him so bad—but you can't. You should’ve composed yourself better instead of acting out. You should’ve been honest instead of lying. Jimin kept his end of the bargain—he was okay living normally with that memory. It was you who couldn’t bear it.

You tried to pretend it never happened because that line of thoughts might lead you to be in a position of losing him—and somehow you still ended up losing him anyway.

Your phone buzzes, making your heart leap into your throat.

You grab it so quickly you nearly knock over your coffee, and—

A promotional notification.

Right. Of course.

You toss the phone back onto your desk with considerably less care.

Maybe this is karma.

Your thoughts wander somewhere they haven't in a while.

Back to your ex that left you with all the commitment issues in the world. Axolotl. That idiot would've loved this.

Or maybe not loved it. More likely he'd have called it "inevitable."

The man had never understood your friendship with Jimin, not once in the nearly two years you'd dated him. God. Sometimes you forget how exhausting that relationship had been.

Back then, you'd fought about Jimin constantly. Not because there had ever been anything romantic between you and Jimin, but because Axolotl simply couldn't understand the friendship.

"No one talks to their friend this much."

"Why does he need you at midnight?"

"Why are his problems always your problems?"

There was the time Jimin had called you at midnight because he'd been on the verge of a panic attack because the girl he thought he loved was probably cheating on him. You'd spent forty minutes talking him through the mess while half-asleep, only for your boyfriend to wake up furious beside you.

"Block him."

You remember blinking at him in genuine confusion. "What?"

"Block his number."

"He was going through something hard!"

"At midnight."

“So?”

"That's not normal. Block him, right now!"

You hadn't. Obviously. And the argument that followed had lasted longer than the phone call itself. Jimin had apologised the next day for accidentally causing trouble. You'd lied and said there wasn't any.

Then there'd been the infamous speakerphone incident. Damn. You physically cringe.

Jimin had called while you were watching a movie with Axolotl. You'd answered because, well, it was Jimin.

The conversation had lasted all of five minutes before Jimin, completely oblivious to the company you had, had gone: "Anyway, if he doesn't eat you out properly, dump him."

Silence.

You'd nearly swallowed your own tongue. Axolotl had slowly turned his head towards you. You remembered desperately trying to cut Jimin off: “HAHA OKAY GOTTA GO BYE."

Too late, though.

That argument had lasted...what? Three hours? Four? Forever? Because according to him, discussing your sex life with Jimin hadn’t been a thing friends did. It had meant that you wanted Jimin to make it better, somehow. You’d even received accusations of having phone sex with Jimin, to the point where your ex had gone through your entire chat history to find evidence in support of his claims.

Looking back now, wow. Your ex had been one gigantic toxic asshole. Although, you suppose Jimin wasn't exactly helping matters. Who tells their female best friend to demand better oral sex from her boyfriend?

Absolute menace!

A tiny smile tugs at your lips despite yourself. But it disappears just as quickly.

Because that menace hasn't called you once in weeks. Hasn't randomly FaceTimed to show you an ugly pigeon. Hasn't complained about office coffee. Hasn't demanded your opinion on a shirt he'll buy anyway. Hasn't interrupted your lunch break just to tell you he witnessed someone walk into a glass door.

Nothing.

You glance up at the brochure pinned to the board behind your office chair.

The advertising workshop is tomorrow. Jimin is still coming as the keynote. That has to count for something, right? 

You’l finally see him tomorrow. Be in the same room as him. Hear his voice. Maybe even talk in person.

Your stomach performs a strange little flip.

Maybe seeing each other in person will make this strange distance disappear. Maybe things will be normal again. Maybe he'll roll his eyes at you, call you an annoying mess, steal your coffee, complain about the venue—

You stop yourself.

Hope is dangerous.

You've learnt that much over the past weeks. Still, despite yourself, your thumb opens his chat one more time, re-reading your conversation from Wednesday night:

07:22 PM | Text Message to Min 🌟 ↳ hey! ↳ ready for the workshop on saturday? ↳ jackie is taking lead with emceeing and everything. she’ll mail you all the details by tomorrow ↳ we plan to keep it 10 to 2, so you’ll probably be expected to arrive around 9 ↳ keep an eye out for that mail pls! ↳ see you!

10:05 PM | Text Message from Min 🌟 Of course. See you there (:

You trace the smiley face with your thumb.

"Dry-ass bitch."

The muttered insult echoes quietly through your empty office. 

For the first time in your life, it doesn't earn you an equally ridiculous comeback.

It is, objectively speaking, a little funny. Subtly funny. Poetically funny?

The sort of thing you'll probably laugh about in ten years, once the humiliation has expired and enough distance exists between you and the absolute clownery of your own decisions.

Because in the entirety of the years that you've known Park Jimin, you've never once dressed for him.

Not when you were thirteen and painfully convinced your life would end if he found out about your stupid crush. Not when you were nineteen and your friends delighted in insisting the two of you were secretly in love. Not even when he gifted you a gorgeous dress for your twenty-first birthday. Never.

Yet this morning, you spent twenty whole minutes standing in front of your wardrobe, crazily switching through your office shirts and tops, before settling on the cream blouse that Jeongyeon once insisted made you look ‘offensively pretty.’ You even curled your hair. Put on purple lipstick. Wore actual earrings instead of your usual studs.

You'd told yourself it was because there would be photographs from today's workshop. 

(You were full of shit.)

As if that somehow wasn't pathetic enough, when you reach the damn conference venue, you find out that—

Jimin is here with a date.

And it’s someone you know—it’s Avni. Cool, sexy, beautiful Avni that you met all that time ago, in Jimin’s birthday party.

You see them enter the venue together and they positively sparkle. Instead of welcoming them like you’re supposed to, you hide away near the catering table, munching on breakfast items as you plead with Seokjin to greet your guests in your stead. 

You wish to run away from here.

"There you are!"

Blinking in surprise, you tear your gaze away from the other end of the conference hall to find Seokjin standing beside you with two paper cups of coffee, a grin already tugging at his mouth.

You accept one cup with a grimace. “Uh, yeah. Thanks for this.” You look over your shoulder, and point your chin towards the stage. “And that. You’re a lifesaver.”

Seokjin rolls his eyes. “Oh, have I heard that one before.” He shrugs with a wink, before leaning closer to you. "By the way, you really ought to show yourself off today. It’d inspire more people to attend these things.”

“Please.” You scowl at him. “I’m literally in pants and blouse.”

“You do not need to flash your legs to look beautiful, hun.” He gives you a genuine smile. “When I said you looked gorgeous in the car, I genuinely meant that I'd like to formally shake hands with whatever possessed you this morning."

You know what he’s trying to tell you, and you laugh. "You do not need to flatter me to make me feel better."

"I own restaurants. Flattery is practically a business expense."

"You are unbelievable."

"I've heard that one before, too."

You snort into your coffee, and it’s nice. For a while. It's enough of a distraction that, for a few blissful seconds, you stop looking.

And then your eyes wander right back across the room.

Right back to him.

Park Jimin stands with your CEO, one hand tucked into the pocket of his olive grey slacks that he has worn with a matching blazer, atop a deep olive green turtleneck. He looks breathtaking. As always.

Jackie speaks animatedly on his other side. He nods at all the appropriate moments. Smiles when expected. Even laughs once.

It's a perfectly convincing performance.

It would fool almost anyone.

Just—not you.

You know the difference between Jimin smiling because he's amused and Jimin smiling because politeness demands it.

The first one reaches his eyes before it reaches his mouth. The second never quite reaches either.

"Hey, you okay?"

You startle, quickly tearing your eyes off of the object of all your fascination for the night—but not quickly enough. Seokjin has already followed your line of sight. He hums quietly to himself.

"Mhm."

Immediately, you scowl. "Don't."

"I didn't say anything."

"You were thinking something. Stop it"

"I’m trying."

He isn’t. The bastard looks positively delighted, a grin etched across his face. "You know,” he says lightly, “I received him at the gates because you told me you skipped coffee. But seeing what I see now…hiding in the shadows to escape confrontation isn’t a good look on you.”

You glare at Seokjin with all the anger you can muster. He shrugs his shoulders, though, because that’s what you’ve earned through these past few weeks. Somehow, Seokjin has kind of become someone you’ve been talking to a lot. Not exactly like a diary that you pour your heart into to feel lighter—more like a water reminder app that ensures you stay hydrated, everyday.

He keeps checking in on texts, drops by your office during lunch break every other day, hitches a ride home with you whenever you stay late at the office, and last to last Saturday, when you were feeling especially lonely, he forced you to go drunk bowling with him and a bunch of his equally loud and unhinged friends.

“You can’t avoid him forever.”

“I’m not avoiding—”

“Especially when he is the keynote at a workshop that your department is heading.” Seokjin gives you a meaningful look. “You’re kinda the contact person who invited him, y’know?”

“I know. And I’m—”

“And you look like a loser, right now. All dressed-up, only to be sticking to a corner and staring at him across the hall.”

"I—” You break off with a scoff of annoyance. “I am literally looking at everyone!"

"And yet your eyes keep landing in the tiny corner where only three out of a hundred people are gathered together?"

You shoot a quick, sharp glare at Seokjin. "Coincidence."

"Mhm."

"You’re abhorrent. Bet you’ve never heard that one before, huh?"

Seokjin laughs with all of his teeth on display, head thrown back and a hand waving next to his face to dismiss your remark. “I am the glam guest of the night and this is how I get treated.”

“You self-invited yourself to that role and you’re annoying.”

“Mean.”

You just roll your eyes at his comment, when, mercifully, someone calls his name.

He sighs dramatically. "People require me."

"I highly doubt that."

He chuckles, tapping your shoulder. "I'll be back."

"Please don't?"

“Don’t miss me too much!” With one last teasing smile, he disappears into the growing crowd.

You exhale through your nose.

Peace, at last—

“Well, hello there, Miss Best Friend.”

—until a sarcastic announcement next to you breaks it immediately.

You turn to find a familiar woman greeting you. Long, black hair, warm olive brown skin and an easy smile—beautiful in the polished, magazine-ad sort of way, dressed in a fitted grey dress that looks like it costs more than your monthly rent.

“Avni. Hey.”

The gorgeous woman who intimidated you into hiding away, a few minutes back, tilts forward to wrap you in a hug. “So nice to see you again, hun!”

“Yeah, uh, likewise.” You tuck a curl behind your ear, suddenly self-conscious in the presence of this beauty. “So… you’re here with…”

“Jimin, yeah.” She smiles at you, guileless yet mysterious. “By the way, I'm caffeine intolerant and the only other beverage available is strawberry juice. Who the hell’s managed catering for today, girl?”

You're about to respond when Seokjin makes his way back to you—sipping at magenta liquid from a paper cup. “Good lord, the strawberry juice is heavenly. Please thank Lea for me, will you?”

Your wide eyes meet Avni’s and you have to suppress a laugh at the disgusted look she gives Seokjin. The man, though, is completely unbothered as he turns to her. 

“And who might you be, dear lady?”

Avni eyes him up and down, and extends a hand for him to—oh good lord—plant a smooch on. “Avni. You’re the restaurateur cousin of the CEO, right? Seokjin?”

You are only slightly less surprised than Seokjin is. “Uh, yes. So good to meet you, Miss Avni.”

“Is it?” Avni bats her lashes dramatically and then smiles. “Could you be a dear and fetch me a beverage that’s free of caffeine and strawberry acid?”

Seokjin’s mouth opens and closes a few times before he’s tossing a confused look at you and eventually nodding. “Y-yeah, sure! Be back in — in a minute!”

“Nah, you won’t be,” Avni mutters, shaking her head with a chuckle as the guy leaves. “Damn. Your restaurant guy has shoulders.”

You snort at her statement. “Not my guy, by any means, and… sure. Guess he does.”

“Is he single? Because I'm about to make some poor decisions.”

“As far as I know,” you tell her with a chuckle, although you’re a little bit confused. “But, uh… didn’t you come here as Jimin’s date?”

“Mhm, and?”

You’re at a loss, gaze travelling back to the guy across the hall. Are they not dating? Why is she here then?

But as you look at him scanning the iPad for the presentation that Zac gave him earlier, your attention gets absorbed by the look on his face.

You know that expression. You know it because you have seen every version of Jimin there is.

The dramatic Jimin. The annoying Jimin. The ridiculous Jimin who sends you fourteen messages in a row because he saw a dog wearing tiny shoes. The Jimin who laughs so hard he snorts and then denies it happened. The Jimin who lights up when he talks about something he loves.

This isn't any of those.

This is the version of him that appears when he's trying very hard not to let anyone know something is wrong.

And suddenly, you hate how familiar that feels.

“He’s pretending really hard, isn’t he?”

You blink at the astute observation, turning to look at Avni’s sympathetic face in surprise. “I… you think so?”

She rolls her eyes. “Come on, girl. You’re the best friend. You know what I’m talking about.”

You don't answer. Because you do know what she’s talking about.

“He’s louder. Warmer. More…obvious in everything he does,” Avni continues when you’ve been quiet. “I mean I don’t work with him, but I’ve noticed as much just though the few times I’ve been in the same room as him. He’s been living his life on mute, while making crazily reckless decisions at the same time. Care to explain what happened there?”

You? “Me?”

“Come on.” She rolls her eyes. “He texted me on a Wednesday night, out of nowhere, took me out to an Italian restaurant for dinner the next day, and spent twenty minutes talking about you.”

You nearly choke on your next sip of coffee. “What?”

“And then at an Indian restaurant, the minutes went up to thirty. Hence how I got to know about your restaurant guy. Who you say is not yours? Whatever.” She rolls her eyes. “So—what’s Jimin up to? I’m pretty sure I’m a prop. This reads to me like he only took me so that there’d be a semblance of familiarity between us today.” She turns to look at your gaping face. “As if he wanted to convince somebody of something really badly…”

You’re trying to take it all in—but can’t make any sense of it.

“Be honest, babe—did you tell him to do this?”

You nearly drop your paper cup, this time. “What?”

“Nah, this mess has your fingerprints all over it.” Avni exhales, shaking her head. “I don’t know what the hell kinda challenge you gave him, but that poor sap really took it seriously. He’s really trying… checks in on me, asking me if I’ve eaten, if I slept well, if work is good… almost as if he’s following a checklist. Mechanically. Which kinda makes this worse.”

“Avni… just what on earth are you talking about?”

Just like that one time, she gives you a very knowing look as she rolls her eyes. “You know what I’m talking about, girly pop. Stop denying it and clean up this mess. He’s miserable and he doesn’t deserve to be. Besides, he’s making me miserable too, when I'd really rather be doing better things.”

Just on cue, Seokjin arrives with a cardboard box of chocolate milk in his hand. “Here you go, my lady.”

“Oh, my knight in shining armour!” Avni makes a show of putting both her hands on her chest in awe, and then extends one hand towards the carton while the other moves to caress the lapel of Seokjin’s suit jacket. “Look at you. Are you naturally this pretty or do you moisturize?”

You have to pretend to cough to cover your laughter at the gobsmacked expression on Seokjin’s face. She is unbelievable and it’s actually hilarious. Serves Seokjin right for getting onto every last one of your nerves.

While Seokjin jumps into a spiel of—believe it or not—explaining his skincare routine to Avni, you sidle slightly away from the two of them to focus better on the stage that is nearly ready. 

You look at Jimin again.

At the way he stands there. At the way he smiles. At the way he looks like he is physically present but somewhere else entirely.

Your chest tightens. Jimin is smiling again. Perfectly. Professionally. Beautifully. But he looks exhausted. Not bored. Not annoyed. Just—

Empty.

A strange shame settles over you.

All this while, you've been convincing yourself that this Jimin dating someone would make things okay, even if it spelt momentary heartbreak on your end. It would ensure that nothing had changed—that neither of you were risking your friendship to shift the dynamics between you, and you could eventually go back to being the kind of friends you’ve always been.

But standing here, listening to the quiet disappointment and incredulity in Avni’s voice, you finally realize just how selfish you'd been.

You wanted certainty. Security. You wanted to put a bulletproof vest on your friendship. And he followed through for your sake. 

Avni’s words echo in your head:

He’s been living his life on mute, while making crazily reckless decisions at the same time.

He’s miserable and he doesn’t deserve to be.

But before you can dwell on it any longer, applause ripples through the auditorium. 

Jackie steps up on the stage, taking the mic. “Good morning, team! Thank you for joining us on this day—which is set to be greatly informative and motivational for all of us here, as we’ve been joined by a team of industry experts that will share insights into the world of sales, marketing and advertising. To set the tone of today’s seminar and guide us into the heart of the workshop, let us welcome an advertising genius to the stage — ladies and gentlemen, the Regional Director of Geisha Global — Mr Park Jimin!”

The auditorium claps in his welcome as he joins Jackie on the stage, smiling his professional smile and bowing in gratitude. He takes the mic and somehow—

“Good morning fellow advertising enthusiasts and eager learners. I hope you’re all settled on your assigned table and are ready with notepads and pens. The schedule has been pinned on each table: twenty minutes of presentation on advertising follies, then a ten minute coffee break, followed by thirty minutes of Q and A. Then we move onto the next speaker. Let us make today fruitful and informative!”

—somehow the man who looked so impossibly hollow just moments ago transforms beneath the lights. His posture straightens. His smile morphs into something effortless. His voice carries through the room with quiet confidence, warm enough to command attention without ever demanding it.

He's incredible.

Of course he is. He is Jimin. When have you ever known him to be anything less than absolutely brilliant?

He speaks without notes, without pausing or stumbling even once. He commands the stage like he was born to stand in front of an audience. 

You recall his resistance at your initial proposal for attending this event, and can’t keep a fond smile from curling your lips. 

Liar. The idiot had acted like you were inviting him to be executed, only to walk onto that stage looking as though he'd been born beneath spotlights. He moves constantly while he speaks—not enough to pace, just enough that his hands become part of the presentation. Every question from the audience lights something up inside him. Every answer is thoughtful without being rehearsed, funny without trying too hard. 

He is drawing laughter from one side of the room before effortlessly shifting into something thoughtful enough to leave the other side hanging onto every word.

He is a phenomenal speaker.

At some point, you have stopped taking notes—or even listening, altogether.

You're just watching him. Helplessly entranced. Completely spellbound. 

Watching the tiny smile that appears whenever someone asks an unexpectedly clever question.

Watching him tuck a loose strand of hair behind his ear without noticing.

Watching him gesture with the laser pointer before catching himself and sheepishly lowering it again.

The way he gestures, the way his eyes brighten, the way his whole face comes alive when he's explaining details from concepts he introduced.

And suddenly—

Your chest hurts.

Not in the panicked way it has all week. In a quieter way. A fuller way. Like your heart has quietly become too large for your ribs and you can barely breathe. You are so overwhelmed by the time he is winding, that you feel tears pricking the back of your eyelids.

A realization slowly forms in your heart and travels up to lodge into your throat in the form of an emotional lump that freezes you in your spot.

You want to be up there beside him.

You want to steal his laser pointer when he isn't looking. You want to insert sarcastic comments into his in-ears that only he can hear. You want to watch him shine from close enough that no one else gets this view.

And then—the final thought arrives with horrifying simplicity—

You want to kiss him.

And you don’t just want to do it as a result of all the turmoil you’ve been through, all the thoughts you’ve battled, and all the ways you’ve felt about that night these past two weeks—you want to do it because it’s him.

Because he's Jimin.

And because he's standing there looking impossibly brilliant and seeing him shine makes your chest ache with something far too tender to ignore.

The workshop proceeds without a hitch, with Jimin giving way to other speakers that share valuable ideas, until eventually Seokjin gets up there to wrap up the event with a vote of thanks.

The auditorium applauds as he finishes up, and you join in too, looking away from the man while he climbs down the stage, eyes involuntarily moving around to search for Jimin again—

Only to find him looking at you.

Your heart gives a huge leap. This is the first time your eyes have met. In all of the morning. In weeks. 

But before you can even begin to analyse what all his gaze held, he is shaking hands with your boss and handing the iPad back to Zac.

For a few moments, you simply remain seated while everyone else begins collecting notebooks and laptops, conversations blooming all around you as people praise the presentation and crowd toward the stage where the speakers are conversing among each other and with the attendees. 

You hear all of it without really listening.

Because Jimin is still standing beneath the lights, accepting compliments and exchanging contact information with the same easy smile he'd worn throughout the session.

Professional Jimin has always fascinated you. You have seen glimpses of him over the years—on calls with clients, accepting awards, speaking during company events—but never like this. Never for an hour straight.

He makes it look effortless.

You know it isn't. 

You know how anxious he gets before presentations. You know he rewrites the opening sentence seventeen times because he insists the first impression matters. You know he never sleeps properly the night before important meetings.

Yet here he is. Perfect. Beautiful.

Smiling—and still somehow heartbreakingly absent.

The crowd slowly begins dispersing, eventually, allowing you to finally stand. You are clutching your notebook despite having written absolutely nothing for nearly half the seminar. Someone bumps your shoulder in passing, another apologises. You murmur that it's fine.

Everything feels strangely distant.

“Well?”

You blink and look away from Jimin. Seokjin is standing beside you with his arms folded, one eyebrow raised so high it's practically disappeared into his hairline.

"What?"

"So?"

"So...what?"

He studies your face for a beat before something in his expression softens. The smugness fades, replaced by a look that's almost fond. "You look like you survived a storm."

A reluctant laugh slips out of you. "Feels that way, too."

"You looked like the rest of us ceased to exist.” He nods toward the stage where Jimin is still trapped in conversation. “Didn’t even look at me once while I spoke. And here I was thinking I’d ask you for a review later."

Heat immediately rushes into your face. "I… That’s not true! I listened to you!" you lie.

“Nope!” He rolls his eyes. “Tell me what kind of budget I promised we’d set up for the relaunch of the failed product’s ad campaign, then?

You have absolutely no clue. “Uh… double the last time?”

Seokjin doubles over in laughter. “I didn’t even mention any budget, girl!”

"Hey, that’s not fair!” You lament. “I promise I was paying attention!"

"Oh, yes you were." He raises his eyebrows when you pause. "Just not to me."

You groan. "You’re loathsome."

"I’m honest."

Before you can think of a retort, another voice cuts neatly into the conversation:

"Well, you’re also a great speaker."

Avni announces her presence with that comment, smirking at the two of you as she chews on one of the cookies served during the coffee break, some time back. She's watching the two of you with the same amused expression she'd worn the first night you'd met her. It makes your forehead sweat, for some reason.

“If you’re still looking for a review, that is?”

Seokjin gives a hesitant chuckle, visibly nervous in front of this enchantress of a woman. “Uh, yeah. Always.”

"Your voice modulation is great. Which suits your personality. Although it doesn’t even matter all that much.” She pauses with a tilted head. “You own KBBQ, right?"

Wow, she’s somehow scoured more information during the workshop? You raise impressed eyebrows while Seokjin brushes a hand through his hair. “Yes.”

She gives him a long, completely unapologetic once-over. “That tracks.”

Seokjin, who has flirted his way through half the city's population, seems unsure how to respond to being assessed like a particularly promising bottle of wine. He opens his mouth—then shuts it. Finally, chuckling a little, he clears his throat and meekly asks: “Should I ask what that means?”

“No.” Avni smiles pleasantly as she steps closer to the two of you. “It'll ruin the mystery.”

You watch a physical shudder pass through Seokjin and have to bite down hard on the inside of your cheek to stifle a reaction. He glances sideways at you. You offer him absolutely no assistance.

"So, are you seeing anyone?" The question lands with the subtlety of a brick.

Seokjin blinks. “Excuse me?”

“I said—”

“I heard you.”

"So?"

"No, I’m not…?" He glances at you, but you’ve started to pretend you do not see or hear the two of them and whatever the hell they’re doing, right now.

"Perfect." Avni flashes another smile. "I was getting worried."

Seokjin, meanwhile, finally starts to smile. "You don't waste time."

"Life's short."

You make a face. Honestly. She'd spent the better part of the morning looking as though she'd rather lick the carpet than stand beside Jimin for another minute. And now she's positively sparkling.

It would almost be impressive if it weren't so—

Well. Annoying.

You look towards the stage once again, where people are slowly starting to thin out as well. You wonder if Jimin has noticed what just happened. If he's seen the woman he’s dating—although reluctantly, given Avni’s claims—openly interviewing another man before she's even collected her bag from reception.

Maybe he has...and simply doesn't care.

If you are to really believe what Avni said to you—which you don’t really have a reason not to—then it sure is the latter case.

"I was actually about to head out," Seokjin’s announcement brings your focus back to him.

He was your ride here!

Avni nods once. "Excellent. I haven't eaten."

Seokjin opens his mouth. Then turns to look at you, slightly panicked and slightly asking for help. You raise one eyebrow and take a very deliberate sip of your rapidly cooling coffee. “I’m gonna stay and chat with Jackie. We’ll catch a cab later.”

His shoulders sag. "I cannot believe you."

"I believe in independence." You shrug.

"You believe in watching me suffer." Then, much to your immense satisfaction, Seokjin turns to Avni with a sigh. "So you wanna get lunch with me?."

"There we go." Avni cheekily nods, stepping up closer to Seokjin.

You’ve given up on trying to escape and just slump into one of the chairs. This entire thing sure as heck is highly entertaining, if you put aside all implications for a while.

"You like to go for the kill, huh?" Seokjin asks her.

Avni smiles. "Hook, line and sinker"

He snorts. "I like you."

"I know."

"No, that wasn't—"

"I know." She waves the comment away as though she's heard it a hundred times already. "Come on."

Before Seokjin can quite process what's happening, she's already started walking toward the exit. He exhales the long, theatrical sigh of a man walking willingly toward his own downfall before catching up to her. She falls into step beside him immediately. Within seconds, Seokjin is laughing again. 

You watch as they and the sound of their conversation disappear through the auditorium doors. You can't help huffing out a quiet breath through your nose.

Well, that was something.

People continue streaming out of the venue around you, chatting excitedly about the seminar, exchanging LinkedIn profiles and promises to keep in touch. The chatter swells and fades in waves until it begins to sound like white noise. You remain rooted exactly where you are, staring at the doors that people keep slipping past, feeling oddly hollow now that the distraction is gone.

The exhaustion settles over you all at once.

Not physical exhaustion—though there is certainly plenty of that after an entire day spent pretending you were perfectly fine—but the kind that burrows beneath your ribs and makes even the thought of moving feel impossibly heavy. It feels as though you've been holding your breath since the morning.

You only realize you aren't alone at the table anymore when a familiar voice quietly cuts through the silence beside you.

"Looks like your figuring-it-out just got stolen."

Your heart stumbles at the familiar rumble of the timbre that you’ve missed more than can be expressed in words.

Slowly, you turn your head.

Jimin stands beside you with his gaze fixed on the doors. His blazer hangs carelessly over one shoulder, secured beneath two fingers, while the sleeves of his turtleneck have been pulled up to his forearms. As though he's finally given himself permission to stop looking like the polished executive everyone else had applauded only an hour ago.

He still looks stunning. But he also looks tired — the kind that no amount of sleep ever seems to fix.

You wish to say something. Ask him why he doesn’t look bothered that Avni left with another man. Ask him why he even brought Avni here. Ask him if he went on dates with her for your sake.

Though none of that comes out of your mouth when you whisper: “You were phenomenal, Jimin.”

That earns you a glance.

For the first time all day, something achingly familiar flickers across Jimin's face. Not the practiced smile he'd been wearing through every networking conversation, or the carefully neutral expression he'd perfected over the last few weeks whenever the two of you occupied the same room, just—

Him.

A tiny, dry smile tugs at one corner of his mouth. Worn-out. Half-hearted. The ghost of the expression that used to appear whenever he was about to say something outrageous solely to hear you groan in response.

It's gone almost as quickly as it appears. He shrugs one shoulder and wryly says, “Couldn’t let you down.”

“You never can.”

His shoulders rise in a slow inhale before falling again.

"So..." His eyes drift back toward the parking lot. "Need a ride home?"

You stare at him at the unexpected question.

It’s not unexpected in the sense of its form—Jimin has driven you home more times than either of you could count over the last decade. Sometimes because your car was in the shop. Sometimes because he'd insisted on borrowing yours. Sometimes because one of you happened to be staying over at the other's place afterward anyway.

Sometimes simply because you wanted to spend time with each other. 

It’s unexpected because of the timing. Why would he offer you that when you’ve barely been talking? When this is the first face-to-face exchange of words you’ve had in a month?

It becomes even more off-putting when he clears his throat a second later, without looking at you, and clarifies the reasoning for his offer. "Seokjin drove you, right? I heard him talking to Lea. Also…" He shrugs one shoulder beneath the weight of his blazer. "He kinda abandoned you for my date, so... seems fair."

The joke is terrible. Deliberately terrible. It earns the weakest puff of laughter from you—more breath than sound—but that seems to be enough to make the corner of his mouth twitch again.

Not into a proper smile, yet, just... something close enough.

You look at him for another long moment. He isn't looking back as if giving you an out.

If you tell him no, he'll nod, leave you to hitch a ride with one of your co-workers or just hail a cab home. He won't push. He won't ask again.

He's always been good at pretending disappointment doesn't hurt.

Your gaze travels to where Jackie, Zac and Lea are packing things up. You can go with them. You probably should.

After everything that's happened over the past few weeks, spending another thirty minutes alone with Park Jimin inside the confined space of his car sounds like the kind of decision your therapist would write several concerned notes about.

And yet—

The thought of watching him walk away again somehow feels worse.

"Okay," you hear yourself say quietly.

Jimin blinks once before nodding. "Okay."

Neither of you says anything else as you begin walking toward the parking lot together, separated by barely a foot of pavement that feels wider than the distance either of you has ever known between yourselves.

The familiar chime of Jimin's car greets the two of you as he unlocks it remotely, headlights flashing once in the dimming evening. Neither of you initiates conversation while settling inside. You quietly buckle your seatbelt, smoothing invisible wrinkles from your pants and blouse, more for something to do with your hands than because your clothes need it. Beside you, Jimin places his blazer over the backseat instead of wearing it again, sleeves still pulled up to display his muscled forearms, starts the engine, and waits for the navigation screen to wake before pulling out of the parking lot.

The radio remains off. Normally, one of you would've changed that within seconds.

Jimin couldn't stand driving in silence, and you couldn't stand his playlist looping the same fifty songs until the end of time. It had become tradition to spend every car ride fighting over the aux cable, loudly criticizing each other's taste in music before inevitably singing along anyway.

Today, neither of you reaches for it.

The only sounds inside the car are the steady hum of the engine, the rhythmic clicking of the turn signal whenever Jimin changes lanes, and the occasional sigh of tires rolling over uneven patches of asphalt. Outside, rush-hour traffic crawls sluggishly through the city, headlights bleeding into long ribbons of white and amber beneath the dusky sky.

You’ve sat in Jimin’s car after a really long while. It has never been this constricting before.

Brushing your hands over the smooth, faux leather seat, you’re bombarded with memories.

After late dinners, after movie nights, after helping Jimin assemble furniture or decorate yet another room in the absurdly large townhouse he has somehow talked himself into buying. Your drives are always loud. Conversations about work, ridiculous gossip, arguments over films, or Jimin dramatically recounting heroic stories of buying clothes all by himself because he is the epitome of indecision.

Tonight, silence stretches between you like something physical.

Not exactly uncomfortable, but so fragile that you’re terrified that one wrong word might splinter it into something neither of you knows how to fix.

Your eyes drift toward him almost against your will.

He's driving exactly the way he always does, one hand resting loosely at the top of the steering wheel, the other relaxed beside the gear shift. He looks devastatingly handsome. Jaw clenched, dark hair framing his face, lips pink and soft.

His attention, however, remains fixed on the road ahead, expression unreadable beneath the intermittent glow of passing streetlights.

Too fixed.

You know him well enough to recognize overcompensation when you see it. He's avoiding looking at you.

You wonder if he's noticed you're doing exactly the same thing.

The traffic light ahead turns red. Jimin brakes gently, fingers tapping once against the steering wheel before becoming still again.

The silence has lasted nearly seven minutes. Yes, you’ve been looking into the navigation display’s clock.

You make up your mind to initiate conversation, but you're unsure. You wish to give him a compliment for how fantastic he was today. But the two of you have never really given each other praises without playful teasing.

You don't feel like you could be playful, right now.

And so you decide to say the other thing that's been on your mind since morning.

“So…” you begin, your voice startling you with how loud it sounds inside the enclosed space.

Jimin hums in acknowledgement, eyes on the traffic light, resolutely away from your general direction.

It makes you hesitate a bit, but you bravely go on: "Avni seemed fun."

A tiny smile ghosts across his mouth. "She is."

His answer is simple—so simple, it gives nothing away. You swallow. You need to know. "You like her?" 

Immediately, you regret asking. You did not wish to be this direct. All you wanted was to know how he saw things from his end, given the tales Avni told you about his disinterest in her and his possible interest…elsewhere. Besides, what right do you have asking him that when you couldn't be straightforward with him about Seokjin?

The light turns green. Jimin eases the car forward, waiting until he's completed the turn before answering.

"She's fun."

You close your eyes in brief ire. "That's not what I asked."

His fingers tighten imperceptibly around the steering wheel. The movement is so slight that anyone else would've missed it, but you don’t. After so many years, you've learned to read every language his body speaks. The silence stretches long enough that you begin convincing yourself he isn't going to answer.

Then, so quietly you almost miss it—

"No,” he breathed out.

Your heart stutters. "You don't like her?"

He shakes his head once. "No."

No elaboration. No jokes. No attempt to soften the admission. Just one small word carrying far more weight than it should. You stare at him for another moment before forcing yourself to look back out the window. "Oh."

Avni was right. He doesn't like her.

Why did he go out with her, then? Or maybe he went out because he thought he'd like her and later realised that he didn't. 

God. There are so many implications to draw, so many stories to make up. An expressionless “no” literally tells you nothing about what happened.

The city continues slipping past outside. People hurry along sidewalks, a couple argues playfully while trying to fold their baby’s stroller, a group of university students laughs loud enough that you can hear them even through the closed windows.

Life continues with startling normalcy. Inside the car, yours feels suspended.

"What about Seokjin?"

You blink at the sudden question. "What… about him?"

"You're with him now?" His tone is almost identical to yours from moments earlier; gentle, careful—trying very hard not to sound like the answer matters. “Is it official yet?”

You lean your head back against the seat and decide to just stop. Stop with crazy made-up lies about Seokjin, the unnecessary secrecy, the nonsensical drama. "I… I'm not with him. I haven't been dating him. Or… sleeping with him.”

The words leave easily, simply, as if they've been waiting behind your teeth all day for the first crack in your composure.

Jimin's head turns toward you before he catches himself and looks back at the road. “What?"

"Seokjin and I…” You wet suddenly dry lips. "We're not..." Your hands lift briefly before falling back into your lap. "We're not what I made you think."

Another long stretch of silence ensues.

"So..." Jimin says slowly, as though assembling a puzzle one piece at a time. "You’re not…figuring-it-out… with him?

You huff out the smallest laugh. "No."

"But..." He trails off. "I genuinely thought..." His brows pull together. "You had been seeing him, right? All those pictures, that one caption with the heart emoji…”

"I… I’m not really seeing him. We’ve become sort of friends and we hang out, sure, but… strictly as friends."

“That day when I face-timed you and you said he was coming over…” Jimin shakes his head once. "I assumed that meant nightly activities. Maybe even routinely… nightly activities, in fact.”

"It didn't." You smile faintly despite yourself. "We've been on exactly one date."

He looks at you again, one quick glance. "One?"

You nod.

"And you weren't even sleeping together?" His eyes look cloudy.

It's strange how that is equally important to him, but you've decided to come fully clean, so you tell him, "I haven't slept with him."

The words settle quietly between the two of you.

Jimin says nothing. His expression doesn't noticeably change.

And yet something visibly shifts.

The tension you've been watching him carry loosens by the smallest fraction.

He lets out a breath through his nose. “Why did you lie to me?”

You exhale. “Not sure. I felt embarrassed, I guess? Like… I’d been thirsting after him for so long, and then when the opportunity was there—I just didn’t want him anymore.”

“Mhm. Also got something to do with wanting to make me believe you were not hung up on our night together?”

Your mouth drops open at the way Jimin is able to deduce and also put in words exactly what went on in your head. You give a defeated sigh. “Well, yeah. That too, I guess.”

Jimin’s lips twitch. “Well. It was bound to happen since he got demoted from horny daydreams material to post-sex pity package."

A startled laugh escapes you before you can stop it. “What?”

“Obviously. You found him hot, you'd been fantasizing about him—but then you went and had some mind-blowing sex which made you realise it wasn't him that attracted you, just the opportunity to blow off some steam.” There's a smirk on his face, the only sign that he's not actually serious because his tone gives nothing away. “So when you finally had the opportunity to be with him, you didn't want it. Admit it—you just went on that one date out of pity, didn’t you? Because it was pre-planned?”

“What the actual fuck? I wasn't pitying him! That's so mean!” you scoff at the accusations, rolling your eyes with a laugh because this is so utterly ridiculous. “You’re such an idiot…”

"I know." His answering smile is small, but not as painful as the others you've seen today.

For just a second, it feels familiar enough to make your throat tighten.

“Oh, and in case she herself didn’t make it absolutely clear—I’m not dating Avni."

You turn to him with an inhale. “Yeah, she mentioned how she felt like you weren't actually into it. But… you still brought her as your date."

"I did."

"So..."

"So what is the definition of dating someone?" He laughs under his breath but the sound is empty. "I figured you'd be here with Seokjin, so I wanted to bring a date. Y’know. To not make you feel pressured and make things normal. I asked Tara to hook me up with someone who'd be interested in accompanying me to this event—and she sent her sister’s number. So I asked Avni and she thought it'd be fun. She's outgoing, she likes meeting people, and she figured free food wasn't a bad deal.

You blink several times, trying to understand what he’s trying to tell you.

"I also took her out for dinner. Twice."

"Jimin." You frown in confusion. "That is the definition of dating someone.”

"No." He shakes his head, adamant. "It’s not. That’s not what I was doing."

"What were you doing, then?"

For the first time since leaving the venue, he visibly falters. His grip tightens around the steering wheel until his knuckles pale beneath the passing streetlights. When he finally answers, his voice is so quiet you almost miss it.

"Homework,” he breathes out. “Assigned by the one person I can never say no to."

You stare at his profile, aghast. Avni was right. He wasn't into it.

He really asked her out, went on dates, brought her here—because you asked him to?

You believe this hurts more than if he'd admitted he actually liked Avni.

The apartment feels unfamiliar despite being a place you've both walked into hundreds of times. Because both of you haven’t been under this same roof since that day. 

It's been a month. 

In the three years you've both been living in this city, this is the longest you've gone without dropping by each other's place.

Usually, Jimin would have kicked off his shoes the second he entered, complained about the temperature, stolen something from your fridge despite claiming he wasn't hungry, and made himself comfortable like your home belonged to him.

Tonight, he stands near the doorway for a few seconds longer than necessary, staring across the hall at the dining table where you two had the conversation that has led you down the path of indifference and pain.

You don't say anything, simply move aside and let him in.

Jimin makes a beeline for the couch, sitting on it with his elbows resting on his knees, hands clasped together. He stares at the floor for so long that you almost wonder if he is recalling all that has transpired in this very space. Given the mask of complete defeat that he wears, however, you highly doubt that.

"I tried dating apps,” he finally says, a tiny, humorless smile crossing his face. "Yoongi made my profile."

Despite yourself, you scowl at the name. “Yoongi? Are you, like, friends with him now?”

A strange look crosses Jimin’s face even as he nods.

You clear your throat, stashing that discussion away for some other time. “And? How was it?"

"Disastrous." For a second, he looks like himself again—and then the smile disappears. His fingers rub together restlessly. "For a few days, I tried to see if I could do it… Really tried.”

You believe him. You know Jimin—you know how much effort he puts into things he cares about. Which means that he must really have tried. 

"I talked to a few people. Some even seemed nice," he continues. "Funny, kind, beautiful. I enjoyed some of the conversations. But…"

He pauses and looks up at you—deep pools of brown carrying desperation, sadness and…hope.

"But?” you breathlessly prompt him to continue. 

“But I realised I don't want to take it anywhere with any of them. I don't want to get to know someone new, I don't want to go through the process of learning them to the point of liking them.”

Jimin's eyes are fixed somewhere past your shoulder.

“So as a last resort, I just asked Tara. Because I wanted to show you that I was following through with the promise I made, but… I really don't want to get into dating. Don't make me do this. Please.”

The words hit you square in the middle of the chest, making your knees buckle beneath you. 

“Jimin…”

"You wanna know the truth? After everything we've said about our night together, after promising that it would never change a thing between us…” His eyes stare into yours, now. Full of pain and yet so empty at the same time. “I still can't help thinking about the what-ifs. I can't stop myself from picturing the possibilities. I can't let go of the hope of what it could be like if it went right, if we weren't so terrified of what could go wrong.”

His eyes slowly start to become watery, which you're hardly able to see clearly because of the tears filling your own.

“Jimin, please don't. W-we can't. It's – it's fifteen years of friendship, Min… That's—th-that’s more than half of our lives!” You're sobbing now, shaking your head to physically deny the mere prospect of things going wrong between you two. “I can't lose you…”

Jimin looks at you. “What makes you think you will?”

“You know me. I know myself.” You shake your head. “Everything changes when that line is crossed. I–I end up ruining everything, Min…”

Jimin exhales, closing his eyes as he shakes his head, too. You know that he knows what you're saying. He's seen every excuse you've made. He's been there to witness it every time you've run before someone could get close enough—every time you've convinced yourself you didn't want something because wanting it meant you could lose it.

“But this isn't like every other time, is it? This is us. We've already crossed more lines than you could even make.” His eyes are soft when they meet you again. “We can't know how it might be until we try. Why can't we just…try?”

Your heart breaks at the plea that is implicit in his words—not because you don't have an answer, but because you do have one.

You just don't know how to say it without destroying the one thing you've spent all this time trying to protect.

You look at him through blurry eyes, and you see him. The version of him you've cherished all these years. The person who has sat beside you through every heartbreak, every bad decision, every moment where you convinced yourself that leaving first hurts less than being left.

If you didn't want him, this would be easy. If this was someone else, it wouldn't matter. But this is Jimin – this is a decade and a half of memories and inside jokes and knowing exactly what the other is thinking by the look on their face.

He's the person you call when something funny happens before you even think about it. The person whose happiness you protect instinctively. The person who feels less like someone you met and more like someone you've always had.

And that is exactly why you can't do this.

Because loving him means there is something to lose.

He's your home. You can't risk losing him.

"I just can't take that risk, Jimin. I'm—I’m sorry…"

The silence afterward is devastating.

Jimin looks at the ground with a depreciating smile. "Can't… Or won't?"

The words shake you as if you've been physically struck.

"You're so scared of things getting ruined that you yourself do the ruining before anything else can.”

He says it like an observation, and he's absolutely right. Of course he is. He knows you inside out. Your fears, your issues, all of your nonsense.

You wish you could brave them this once—but you've seen the destruction happen way too many times to risk this. You and Jimin. The bond you couldn't survive without.

You're a coward and Jimin knows it better than anyone else. He has spent years watching you run from anything that could matter too much. And now he's the thing you're running from.

Your tears fall faster. "I am sorry, Jimin..."

For a moment, he looks at you. Eyes vacant and lips pursed.

Then he nods, small and resigned, like he understands even though he doesn't want to.

You almost wish he would yell—blame you, call you names. You would welcome anger. You would even welcome hatred, over.

But Jimin has always been too gentle with you. Even now. Especially now.

Very softly, he whispers: "I understand."

And those words absolutely defeat any strength you had remaining. He understands? Why? Why can't he fight over this? Why doesn't he declare you're the worst person in his life and he wishes he never met you?

Why does he…understand?

He stands to leave and you immediately stand to stop him—

But you don't. 

He collects himself slowly, wiping at his face as though embarrassed by the tears that he couldn't stop. He picks up his blazer from the couch and slips it over his arm.

Your hand moves slightly, but it doesn't reach him.

Jimin walks to the door—and you notice everything he doesn't do.

He doesn't remind you to eat dinner. He doesn't tell you he'd text you when he reaches. He doesn't make some stupid joke to make the moment less painful. 

He doesn't say he'll see you tomorrow.

Because maybe, this time, he doesn't know if there will be a tomorrow.

The door closes quietly behind him.

Now, Jimin has walked away from you a million times before, too—but he has always come back.

This time, standing alone in your quiet apartment, staring at the closed door, you have the terrifying feeling that maybe this time… he won't.

— note #2: idk why i kept imagining katseye's lara as avni throughout this chapter!

© jimilter | 2026

[narikang]

angst

😭🙏dont u hate it when u type in angst and instead get smut

Im literally losing my damn mind because of it

WE IN THE BIG 2026 AND YALL PUTTING TO MANY SMUT

Im a freak too okay I get it but

I SOMETIMES JUST WANT A GOOD ANGST EITH MY PERIOD, OR JUST WANT TO BE IN AN EMOTIONAL BTCH 😭😭😭💔

[jungkoode]

read five seconds to freedom by jungkoode

[inkh3art]

Almost meant nothing Ch V

✿ Summary

Her father’s death was ruled an accident. She calls it opportunity.When she and her mother push the powerful Park family for compensation, they expect control but Jimin, the heir, doesn’t bend. He investigates her instead.What begins as a simple encounter turns into a quiet war, each of them holding truths that could destroy the other.So he offers her a choice:Disappear or marry him which is a solution neither of them wants, but both might need.

✿Rating:18+ (if minor please skip)

✿Pairings:CEO heir!!Park Jimin x reader

✿Genre/Trope:Contract Marriage!!Power imbalances!!Slow burn!!Mutual Blackmail! Enemies to lovers!! Forced Proxmity!!

✿Warning: Themes of child abuse,trauma,neglect,emotional manipulation and refrences to past sexual exploitation. If it triggers you do not read or read with care.

🫧🫧🫧

She bad and her head bad

Escaping her van is a Wonderland

And its half past six

Read skies cause time don't exist

But when the stars shine back to the crib

Superstar lines back at the crib

And we test out the tables

All glasses and four feet wide

But its a must to get us ten feet high

She give me sex in a handbag

I get her wetter than a wet nap

🫧🫧🫧

House of balloons/Glass table girls-The Weeknd

The sun poured through the floor-to-ceiling windows of a room bigger than your entire apartment.For a moment, your mind blanked and everything felt foreign letting the silk sheets to sink beneath your fingers.

The scent of expensive candles lingering in the air along with the deafening silence. Then reality crashed back into you.

The mansion.

The gala.

The devil himself.

Park Jimin.

And his stupid arrangement.

Your stomach dropped. You gripped the sheets beneath you as the room spun slightly. Nausea climbed up your throat, but nothing came out. It simply sat there, heavy and suffocating. A knock sounded at the door before it opened without waiting for an answer.

A maid walked inside carrying an envelope sealed with the Park family crest.“Mr Park is out of town, but he requested you read this immediately.”

You frowned, taking it from her she however didn't waste time bowing politely before excusing herself, leaving you alone once more. Leaving you to open it. At the top, written in neat black lettering, were four words.

RULES OF THE AGREEMENT

You couldn't help but scoff he was such a bitch, of course that man would turn your entire life into a contract. As you began reading it you felt your freedom crumble.

Rule One: Never embarrass the Park family publicly. Your actions represent me before they represent yourself.

Rule Two: The media is not your friend. Any statement released without my approval will have consequences.

Rule Three: You will attend every event, dinner, meeting, and gathering requested of you. Excuses will not be tolerated.

Rule Four: You will not seek employment. Your responsibility is to maintain the image we are creating.

Rule Five: My family comes before your comfort. Their words are to be respected, regardless of your feelings.

Rule Six: This engagement is a partnership, not a fairytale. Do not mistake my actions for affection.

Rule Seven: Your safety is now my concern. My security will accompany you wherever necessary.

Rule Eight: Defiance has consequences. Test my patience once, and you’ll understand that very quickly.

You stared at the page your eye twitching.“What a fucking asshole,” you mutter, immediately reaching for your phone.

He answers after two rings.

“Jimin, who the fuck do you think you are?”

A chuckle echoes through the speaker does this think this is a joke or is the man just missing a few screws.

“Hello to you too.” He mutters in a smug tone, I could almost see him on the otherside of the phone tilting his head slightly his dark eyes narrowed with amusement, the corner of his mouth pulled into that infuriating smirk he wore wherever someone else's misery entertained him.

“This contract is absurd.”

“Says the poor one.” He says quietly. "It almost funny how people with nothing always seem to have the loudest opinions like your father but he's silent now."

You freeze.

His voice remains calm and cold, almost like he's bored. “You forget where you stand very easily.”

Your jaw tightens.

God.

He was such a bitch.

“Where is my mother supposed to stay?” you ask.

He scoffs almost like he doesn't care maybe because he doesn't or maybe because he had everything easy. “Am I her keeper?”

“I won’t agree unless she gets a home.” You didn't care what the consequences of saying that were but as much as your mother contributed in your trauma she's the only one who cared enough to try who hated herself for birthing you for the wrong man.

Silence.

Then an irritated sigh. “Fine.”

Your brows furrow as that was almost too easy but after he spoke your judgment faded.

“I’ll arrange a house and a maid.”

He pauses.

“She’s clearly not stable enough to live alone.”

You freeze.

His words knock the air from your lungs and suddenly you’re three years old again in a dress not suitable for winter, bruises painted on your skin ones you barely understood. You could see your mother running through the apartment your father chasing her.

A broken bottle in his hand her screams echo in your mind almost like it's happening right now. Like he's still here hands on your arms forcing you towards an old man with yellow teeth and dark eyes. You can hear her begging and telling him to stop giving you away.

To stop hurting you.

You remember hiding under a table, hands over your ears, waiting for it to end.

It never did.

He was dead, but he had left pieces of himself behind, marks that no longer lived on your skin but had been permanently carved into your mind. His abuse ended physically, yet it never truly ended at all.

Even now you could still see them.

Those unfamiliar men reaching their hands out to you. The exchange of cash passing from their hands into his. The proud smile he wore afterwards.

You could still hear his voice.

"You're doing great for the family."

"This is how I show my love."

Love

What a disgusting thing to call it, I never experienced pure love but I was certain it wasn't meant to leave bruises behind or make a child feel like a transaction.

“Are you listening?”Jimin’s voice snaps you back to reality.

You blink.

“Unfortunately.” You mutter your voice lacking it's usual bite as heat rushed through my body before leaving a cold shiver leaving you nauseous.

He lets out a humourless laugh. "Good. Memorise the rules.” he said with a terrifying calmness one you wished for at this moment.

A pause.

“Then burn the paper.”

You scoff.

“And if I don’t?” you ask quietly hating how the words lack sharpness. You hated how your mind was too busy fighting ghosts from your past to properly fight the man standing in your present. You had spoken weakness to one man you refused to fall victim to it again.

He doesn’t hesitate.

“Then you’ll learn why I don’t repeat myself.”

The line goes dead leaving you to stare at the phone.

Then at the paper.

Then around the room.

The expensive room.

The expensive house.

The expensive prison.

And for the first time since agreeing to this arrangement…It hits you as you didn’t just agree to marry Park Jimin.

You agreed to survive him....

You couldn't fight it anymore, you shot up from his bed you knees buckling beneath you as a wave of nausea crashed over your body. Your lungs burned refusing to take in enough air as you stumbled towards the bathroom.

Then it all came out as your hands gripped the edge of the toilet sear, your entire body trembling as tears streamed uncontrollably down your cheeks.

The memories seeped back in your fathers voice echoed inside your head. "You're weak, you bitch"

Your breathing became uneven as you tried thinking of something else.

Anything else.

Then another image surfaced.

Your mother.

You could see her cowering in fear before rushing towards you as your small body went limp years ago. "You're not useless. You're special. Look at me....don't fade away." Her voice lightly cracked as she carried on. "I'm sorry. If i had been brave enough, I would've run away with you. But I'm weak now."

The memory shattering something inside you. You wiped your mouth with your shaking hands as you adjusted yourself against the cold tiles.

No one was going to save you.

No knight in shining armor.

Not your mother.

This arrangement wasn't about finding joy in money.

It was about survival because if there was one thing life taught you, it was that happiness is temporary.

Survival wasn't.

And right now your mother's happiness mattered more than your own.

All rights reserved to @inkh3art ,2026. Do not copy,repost or translate.

[jungkoode]

FIVE SECONDS TO FREEDOM | 10

pairing: jimin x f!reader | rating: 18+ | wc: 14,7k | warnings: here genre: latino!jimin, tokyo drift AU, street racing, rivals to lovers

"me dan ganas"

"The AE86 has survived street races, mechanical abuse, and your questionable life choices. It may not survive Park Jimin realizing that you like him angry, bilingual, and dangerously close."

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↦author's note: Okay, I will just preface this by saying: this shit is nasty.

Like, this is basically 14k words of smut. Don’t ask me anything. I don’t know what happened. Jimin started going crazy, I tried to hold him back, he bit through the leash, escaped containment, and suddenly we had 14k words of him being so catastrophically down bad that I had to sit back and let natural selection take its course.

He is a loser. A beautiful, bilingual, horny loser. And unfortunately for all of us, I am merely the vessel.

That being said, beneath all the filth and the mechanics-bay crimes against God, this chapter is actually very important for Hachi. Not just sexually, but emotionally. This is a character who has spent most of her life treating her body like something to manage, conceal, discipline, and keep under control. She is used to being perceived before being understood. She is used to having to make herself sharper, harder, less accessible, less ‘distracting,’ just to be taken seriously in rooms that were never built for her.

So, yes, this chapter is nasty. But it is also about being wanted without being reduced. About desire feeling safe enough to be embarrassing. About the body doing something new before the brain has permission to intellectualize it. About someone seeing the parts of you that made you feel objectified before and reacting with awe instead of entitlement.

And also about Jimin being so obsessed with boobs that he briefly loses his higher cognitive functions.

Duality. Literature. Feminism. Tits. We contain multitudes.

Anyway. Read the tags, drink water, do not perceive me too closely, and remember that I am not responsible for Jimin’s behavior. He is a grown man, unfortunately. I just type the crimes.

The way Jimin walks through the mechanic bay is worse than yelling.

Way worse.

Yelling is just noise, just volume, just someone losing control. This—the peaceful stride, the back of his head, the complete silence—is control.

Restrained, purposeful, ominous control.

He reaches your AE86, parked along the back wall of the bay where you left it before the convoy.

His hand comes up. Taps the hood. Twice. Like he’s greeting it.

Still hasn’t turned around.

“Nice technique.”

Two words, low and even.

And they don’t sound nice at all.

Your chest coils. Tight. That feeling you get at the top of a hill before the descent—anticipation threaded with the knowledge that gravity’s about to make every decision for you.

“Thanks,” you say.

He turns enough to give you the side profile—the cut of his jaw, the line of his nose, the way his tongue pushes against the inside of his cheek and stays there. His eyebrows are raised. Not in surprise. In that specific way that says ‘I am giving you one chance to explain yourself before I stop being civil about this.’

His eyes find yours.

And he explodes.

“¿Estás loca? ¿Me estás jodiendo? ¡Te tiraste de costado en una curva a ochenta kilómetros por hora en un auto que manejaste DOS VECES EN TU VIDA!” (Are you crazy? Are you fucking with me? You threw yourself sideways into a curve at eighty kilometers an hour in a car you’ve driven TWICE IN YOUR LIFE!)

The Spanish comes out like an avalanche—fast, heated, consonants clipping, vowels dragging in that way they do when he’s too worked up to regulate his accent.

His hands leave his pockets, gesturing broad and emphatic, the way he only does when his body can’t contain whatever’s happening inside his head.

“¡OCHENTA, Hachi! ¡De costado! ¡En un Mustang que pesa DOS TONELADAS y que apenas conocés! ¿Sabés lo que pasa si calculás mal eso? ¿SABÉS?” (EIGHTY, Hachi! Sideways! In a Mustang that weighs TWO TONS and that you barely know! Do you know what happens if you miscalculate that? DO YOU KNOW?)

You don’t understand a word.

Not one.

And it’s—

God.

It shouldn’t be attractive.

It really, really shouldn’t.

He’s angry. He’s genuinely, visibly angry in a way you’ve never seen directed at you before—pacing now, three steps one way, three steps back, hand dragging through his hair, jaw working between sentences like he’s two seconds away from losing it completely.

But the sound of it.

The way his voice drops into that rough, low register when the Spanish takes over. The way his body moves differently when he speaks it—more fluid, more open, everything in his posture amplifying what his mouth is doing. The way the words roll and snap and curve, equal parts melody and aggression, like someone wrote a language specifically to make you lose your mind.

God, is Park Jimin hot when he’s angry and speaking Spanish.

And maybe it’s the adrenaline. Maybe it’s the fact that you just slid a 4,000-pound car sideways through a gap that shouldn’t have fit a motorcycle, that your blood’s still carbonated with the kind of chemical high that comes from tricking death and walking away grinning.

Maybe it’s the residual hum of the mountain still vibrating through your nerve endings, that animal part of your brain that processed ‘I didn’t die’ and immediately pivoted to ’so what am I going to do with all this being alive?’

Or maybe—and this is the one you keep circling back to like a car around a track—

Maybe it’s those hands.

The ones currently cutting through the air as he gestures. The ones with the split knuckles from punching Shinji in the jaw for you. The broad palms, the long fingers, the forsaken rings.

The ones that were between your legs days ago and made you cum for the first time ever.

From a stupid thumb.

“—¿y qué hago yo si te pasa algo, eh? ¿Qué mierda hago, Hachi? ¿Le digo a Maya ‘ay, perdón, se mató en MI auto haciendo MI maniobra por MIS problemas’—?” (—and what do I do if something happens to you, huh? What the fuck do I do, Hachi? Do I tell Maya ‘oh, sorry, she got herself killed in MY car doing MY maneuver because of MY problems’—?)

His voice cracks, and you realize he was scared. Watching the race from the lot, watching you disappear sideways through a gap at 80 kph on a phone screen he couldn’t control or change or influence—he was terrified.

That should sober you up. Should make the heat in your stomach cool, should make you want to close the gap and tell him you’re sorry, you’re fine, you won’t do it again.

It doesn’t.

Because your brain—your stupid, wired, post-mountain, adrenaline-poisoned brain—takes the fear in his voice and the anger in his body and the split knuckles on his hands and the way he switched to Spanish because he couldn’t stay in Japanese when he’s this raw and it processes all of that into a single, devastating conclusion:

He cares.

He cares and he’s angry because he cares and he punched Shinji because he cares and he followed the convoy to Hakone because he cares and he’s standing here shaking because he cares and days ago he made you come with those caring, angry, split-knuckled hands and you want them on you again right now.

You want to find out what Park Jimin is like when the restraint runs out and he stops caring.

“—te vi en la pantalla del teléfono de Rico y casi me agarra un infarto, ¿sabés? ¡CASI ME MUERO! Yo acá parado como un pelotudo mirando—” (I saw you on Rico’s phone screen and I almost had a heart attack, you know? I ALMOST DIED! Me standing here like an idiot watching—)

You bite your lip.

He catches it. Exhales. Drags both hands down his face. Looks at you through his fingers.

“This isn’t funny,” he says. Japanese now. Shared language. “Hachi, I’m being serious right now.”

“I know.”

“Do you? Because you’re standing there looking—”

He gestures at your face. Vaguely. Frustrated.

“—like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like you think this is cute.”

It’s not that you think it’s cute.

It’s that you think it’s hot.

His eyes drop to your mouth. Lock.

“No es gracioso, Hachi—” (It’s not funny, Hachi—)

Spanish again. He’s watching you bite your lip and he’s switched languages without realizing it.

Apparently, when the Japanese dissolves and the Spanish takes over, it means the civilized part of his brain has left the building and something more primal is running the show.

You let your teeth drag slowly across the skin before releasing.

“La reputa madre—no hagas eso—” His voice has gone raspy. “No te muerdas la boca cuando te estoy hablando porque me dan ganas y estoy tratando de estar enojado, Hachi—te estoy hablando en serio y vos—” (For fucks sake—don’t do that—don’t bite your mouth when I’m talking to you because I get in the mood and I’m trying to remain angry, Hachi—I’m being serious and you—)

The words tumble, rushed, tripping over themselves, and you catch one phrase because his voice drops when he says it—drops into that basement register that lives somewhere behind your ribs—and wraps around those three syllables like they’re being dragged out of him against his will.

‘Me dan ganas.’

You don’t know what it means.

But it sounds like the noise his throat made when you rolled your hips against him in that twin bed.

It sounds like the exhale he couldn’t hide when your thighs clamped around his hand.

It sounds like want.

Raw, uncensored, involuntary want.

“What does that mean?” you ask. “Me dan ganas?”

He stares at you.

“No.”

“No what?”

“I’m not translating.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re looking—” He points at your face. At your mouth, specifically. “—you’re looking all innocent but you’re actually planning something evil. I see you. I know you.”

“I’m just asking a question.”

“Mentira.” (Liar)

“Does it mean something bad?”

“Hachi—”

“Me dan ganas.” You roll it around your mouth like a lollipop. “Does that mean you wanna fuck me, Jaque?”

He makes a choked exhale that’s half gasp and half disbelief, his head tipping back, eyes squeezing shut like he’s praying to a god who very clearly has a sense of humor.

“Hachi.” He’s trying to physically hold his expression together. “This is—I’m trying to be mad at you right now—”

“But you’re so hot when you’re angry.”

His hands freeze.

He looks at you through his fingers. One eye. Then both.

“What did you just say?”

You step closer, one step that puts you inside the radius of his body heat.

“You heard me.” Your voice drops. Lower than it should. “When you speak Spanish. When you’re angry. The way you pace and your voice goes all…”

You gesture at him.

At his mouth.

“It’s really, really hot.”

“Stop.”

“Me dan ganas.”

“Don’t—you can’t just—” Sputtering. Park Jimin, the smoothest talker in Tokyo’s underground, is sputtering. “You don’t use my language against me—that’s—you don’t even know what it means—”

“I think I know exactly what it means.”

“You DON’T—”

“Hmm.”

You tilt your head the other way. Let your gaze trace from his eyes to his mouth. His jaw. Down his throat where you can see his pulse hammering. The collar of his shirt. Back up. Slow enough that he can feel every stop along the route.

“But me dan ganas,” you say softly.

The pronunciation is atrocious. The vowels are wrong, the emphasis is off, you’re butchering his mother tongue with the cheerful confidence of someone who knows the destruction isn’t in the accuracy but in the attempt.

“La concha de tu madre, Hachi—” (For fuck’s sake, Hachi— / lit: your mother’s cunt)

“I know that one too. You say it a lot.”

Your fingers land on his chest. Just the tips. Light. Feeling his heartbeat under the fabric—fast, hard, furious—and the heat that comes off him in waves.

“I can’t tell, Jaque…” you murmur.

Your fingers begin a slow descent. Down from his collarbone, tracing the center line of his chest. You can feel each breath expand and contract under your touch.

“…Are you mad at me? Or are you mad at me?”

“Both.” It comes out grated. Barely. “I’m—Hachi, you almost died tonight—”

“But I didn’t.”

Your fingers reach his stomach. The muscles there seize under your touch—hard, involuntary, his abs contracting like he’s bracing for impact.

“I’m right here. Alive. In one piece.”

Your hand flattens. Palm against his abdomen. Warm cotton over warm skin over warm muscle that’s jumping under your touch like a current’s running through it.

“And I remember,” you say quietly, “what these hands can do.”

Something in his expression cracks.

“Hachi—”

“Four days ago.” Your thumb traces a small circle against his stomach. Idle. Devastating. “Your thumb. Through cotton. And I—”

“Don’t.”

“—came so hard I couldn’t breathe.”

His hand shoots out. Wraps around your wrist. Doesn’t pull your hand away—just holds it there, pressed against his stomach, his grip tight enough that you can feel his pulse throbbing through his fingers.

He’s shaking.

Not a lot, not visibly, but you can feel it—this fine tremor running through his hand, through his arm, through the entire frame of his body like an engine idling too high.

Restraint.

Pure, white-knuckled, barely-surviving restraint.

“And I want a second one,” you finish.

His free hand finds your hip—grabs it, hard, fingers digging into the bone—and he walks you backward.

Two steps.

Three.

Your lower back hits the hood of the AE86 and the metal is cold through your clothes and the contact shoots straight up your spine and then he’s there—

Caging you.

Both hands braced on the hood on either side of your hips. Arms locked straight. Face inches from yours.

He’s looking at you the way you assume he looked at his phone screen on that mountain—like you’re the most dangerous thing he’s ever encountered and he can’t decide if he wants to save you or take you apart piece by piece.

“You—” His voice is demolished, gravel and want. “You are the worst person I have ever met.”

“And yet.”

You tilt your chin up. Let your mouth hover just below his. Close enough to share air. Close enough that your lower lip almost—almost—ghosts against his.

“Here you are,” you whisper. “Shaking.”

“I’m not shaking.”

“You’re definitely shaking.”

“I’m restraining myself.”

“From what?”

A breath punches out of him. Almost a laugh, almost a groan—this raw, broken sound that vibrates through the few centimeters separating your chests.

“From what—”

He tilts his head. Lets his nose brush yours.

Not a kiss. Worse than a kiss.

A reminder of the distance he’s choosing to maintain and how little of it is left.

“From bending you over this car and—”

He stops. Bites his tongue. Literally—you can see his teeth clamp down on the muscle, can see the effort it takes to swallow the rest of that sentence.

His forehead drops. Lands against yours. Warm, slightly damp with sweat, his breath fanning fast and hot across your lips.

“You just cheated death,” he says against your mouth. “And you’re standing here trying to get me to fuck you instead of letting me be scared about it.”

“Is it working?”

“That’s not the point—”

“Jaque.”

You bring your hand up. The one he’s not holding hostage against his stomach. Your fingers find the back of his neck—the short hair there, the warm skin—and you press. Gentle. Pulling him a fraction closer.

His whole body shudders.

“You wanna be angry?” you murmur. “Be angry. But be angry closer.”

“Hachi—”

“Me dan ganas.”

“You don’t even—that’s not—you’re mispronouncing it—”

“Pero me dan ganas, Jaque.”

“La concha de—” His arms buckle. Just barely. One centimeter of lost distance that puts his mouth even closer to yours. “Hachi, if you say that one more time I’m not going to be able to—”

“Me.”

His grip on the hood tightens until his knuckles go white.

“Dan.”

His breath comes out in a rush against your lips.

“Ganas.”

His mouth crashes into yours and the sound that tears out of him—low, guttural, pulled from somewhere behind his ribs—vibrates straight through your teeth.

His hands leave the hood, both of them, and they’re on you instantly. One fisting the hair at the base of your skull, the other wrapping around your waist, dragging you off the hood and flush against his body with a force that knocks the breath out of your lungs.

He kisses like he races.

Reckless. Aggressive. Zero regard for what happens next because right now is the only thing that exists.

His mouth is open against yours, hot and demanding, tongue sliding past your lips before you’ve even decided to let him in. He tastes like canned coffee and fury and warmth and bitterness, and irma somehow addictive in a way that makes your fingers curl into the fabric of his shirt.

You kiss back harder.

Because you didn’t cheat death on a mountain thirty minutes ago to be delicate about this. You bite his bottom lip—not playful, not teasing, a real bite with real pressure and real teeth—and the noise that rips out of his chest is obscene. This choked, ragged groan that he feeds directly into your mouth.

His hand tightens in your hair. Pulls.

Your neck arches. Involuntary. Throat exposed, and the sound that escapes you is embarrassing—high and thin and nothing like the controlled woman who just won a territorial race against two cars by herself.

“Cute,” he breathes against your jaw.

Asshole.

But he doesn’t give you time to snap back because his mouth is already on your neck. Open, wet, dragging down the column of your throat with this intoxicating intent that makes your toes curl inside your sneakers.

Your hand flies to the back of his head to hold him there.

“Nnh—”

“Fuck—Hachi—”

“Y-you were talking about bending me over something,” you manage. “What happened to that?”

He pulls back just enough to look at you and his face—

God.

Lips swollen. Eyes black. A flush crawling up his throat that you’ve never seen before because this is new territory, this is past the twin bed, past the careful thumb-through-cotton, past every line of restraint he’s drawn since the first time you kissed him.

“Qué boca tan sucia tenés,” he mutters. (What a dirty mouth you have)

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Good.”

He kisses you again. Deeper this time—his tongue finding yours, curling around it, and you suck it into your mouth without thinking and the sound he makes is so filthy it should be illegal.

His hips roll forward, grinding the hard ridge of himself against you—slow, purposeful, a rhythm that has nothing to do with desperation and everything to do with making a point.

Your fingers find the hem of his shirt. Slip under. His stomach is hot and tense under your palms, and you feel the V-lines at his hips, the trail of hair below his navel, the ridge of his waistband.

His breathing fractures against your mouth.

“Fuck, Hachi,” he says. “Your—your hands—Hachi—”

“What about them?”

“They’re cold.”

“Mmm.” You drag your nails lightly down his abdomen. Watch him shudder. “Poor baby.”

He drops his forehead against yours. His breathing is unsteady now, chest heaving. The hand in your hair loosens. Slides down to the side of your neck, thumb pressing against your pulse.

“Fast,” he murmurs.

“What?”

“Your heart.” His thumb strokes once. “Going fast.”

“Yeah, well.” Your fingers trace the line of his hipbone. “You’re grinding on me. Kind of hard to stay calm.”

His laugh is rough. Airless.

Then his hands drop to your hips. Both of them. Grip hard—his fingers digging into the flesh over the bone—and he lifts.

Not picks-up-and-carries lifts. Just—hoists. Tips you back onto the hood of the 86, your ass hitting metal, and steps between your legs in one fluid motion that says he’s been thinking about this specific geometry for a while.

His hands push your knees apart. Settle into the space he’s made. And when his hips meet yours this time—

Better. So much better.

The hard line of his cock presses directly against your pussy through the layers of fabric between you.

Your head drops back. A sound claws up your throat that you barely muffle by biting the inside of your cheek.

He notices. Of course he notices.

“Don’t do that,” he says against your collarbone. His mouth’s migrated south—pressing open, wet kisses along the neckline of your top, his breath heating the fabric. “Don’t swallow it. I wanna hear you.”

“There are people—” You gesture vaguely toward the lot beyond the columns. “—out there.”

“There are walls.” His hips press forward. Slow. Grinding. “And you’re the boss of this place. Nobody’s walking back here.”

He’s right and you hate that he’s right and you hate more that the semi-public element of it is doing something to the back of your brain that you’re not ready to examine.

His mouth finds your neck again. The other side this time. He laps down—lower, closer to where your shoulder starts—and your hands fly to his back, nails raking through the cotton of his shirt.

“Mm—mierda—” His hips stutter against yours. “Do that again.”

You dig your nails in. Drag them up his spine through the shirt.

“Jaque—”

“Say it again.” He’s kissing up your throat now. Jaw, chin, the corner of your mouth. “My name. Say it.”

“Jaque.”

He makes a sound. This low, satisfied growl that vibrates against your skin.

“No—the other one.”

Oh.

Oh.

“Jimin.”

The reaction is immediate. His hips snap forward, involuntary, a thrust with his full weight behind it that punches the air out of your lungs and sends sparks scattering behind your eyelids. Your hands grab his shoulders for purchase.

“Again,” he breathes.

“Ji—min—”

“Here?” He rolls again.

Same spot. Same angle. Same devastating pressure.

“Yes—ngh—yes—”

“Mm.” He adjusts. Finds the angle that makes you twitch and commits to it—slow grinds that drag the hard length of his cock across your clit. “You’re shaking, Hachi.”

“I’m not—”

“Your legs.” His hands find your thighs. Squeeze. “Right here. You’re shaking.”

He’s right. Your thighs are trembling where they’re locked around his hips. Fine, involuntary tremors you can’t control because the friction is building and he’s found the spot and every roll of his hips pushes you closer to something you’re not ready for.

Not yet. Not this fast. You refuse to come from dry humping in a mechanic bay like a teenager in the backseat of their first car.

You grab his face. Both hands. Bring his mouth back to yours and kiss him—messy, wet, all tongue and teeth and the taste of anger and want and the mountain still on both of you.

His hands tighten on your thighs. His rhythm stutters and you feel his breath hitch against your mouth.

Good.

If you’re losing control, he’s coming down with you.

You roll your hips. Into him. Meet his next thrust with a counter-motion that catches him off guard and the sound that spills from his mouth into yours—

“Ha—Hachi—conchetumadre—”

Spanish again. Leaking out between kisses like steam from a valve that can’t hold anymore.

His forehead presses against yours. Eyes squeezed shut. Breathing ragged.

“Tell me something,” you whisper against his mouth.

“What.”

“In Spanish.”

His eyes open. Searching. Half-lidded and blown.

“Why?”

“Because I like the way it sounds when you can’t think straight.”

He laughs. Broken. His hips grind forward again and you feel his cock twitch through the denim and the noise you both make at the same time would be funny if it wasn’t so desperate.

“Sos—” He swallows. Tries again. “Sos la mujer más peligrosa que conocí en mi vida y me estás matando, Hachi, me estás matando—” (You’re the most dangerous woman I’ve met in my life and you’re killing me, Hachi, you’re killing me—)

You don’t understand a word.

You don’t care.

You pull him closer and kiss the Spanish out of his mouth.

And then his mouth moves down your throat and you feel his teeth graze the skin above your collarbone and your hand shoots up—fast, instinctive—and catches his jaw.

He stops.

Looks at you. Confused. Pupils blown, mouth wet, breathing like he’s just run a sprint.

“No marks,” you say.

His brows pull together. His eyes drop to the spot his mouth was heading—the visible skin above the neckline of your top.

The skin Rei would see.

You don’t say that. Don’t need to.

Understanding moves through his expression in stages.

Confusion first. Then recognition. Then something harder—this brief thing that crosses his face like a shadow before he packs it away behind something neutral.

“Right,” he says. Quiet. “The fiancé.”

It’s not bitter. Not accusatory. Just a fact. A variable he’s already accepted.

But his jaw tightens under your hand.

“Below the collar,” you say. “Nothing visible.”

He holds your gaze for a beat. Two. Long enough that you feel the weight of what you’re asking—mark me, want me, but only where nobody else can see.

Only where it’s yours and his and hidden.

Then his mouth curves.

“Below the collar,” he repeats. “I can work with that.”

His hands find the hem of your shirt.

Your stomach contracts from the feeling of his knuckles brushing your hip bones as he gathers fabric, from the slow drag of cotton riding up your stomach, your ribs, the bottom edge of your bra.

He pauses. Checks your face.

You lift your arms.

He pulls the shirt over your head. Drops it somewhere—you hear the soft sound of fabric hitting the floor but you’re not watching the shirt because you’re watching him.

Watching the exact moment Park Jimin sees your tits in a bra for the first time.

And—

Oh.

Oh, this is worth every stupid decision you’ve made in the last week.

He goes still. Completely, utterly still. His hands frozen at his sides where they dropped after pulling the shirt free. His mouth slightly open. Eyes locked on your chest with the focus of a man staring directly into the face of God.

It’s a white bra. Lacey. Nothing obscene—just a well-fitted, pretty thing with scalloped edges and a small bow between the cups that you bought because it was on sale and it fit and you liked the way it looked.

Not that you’ve ever liked your boobs.

You hate them.

You’ve always hated them because they make you a target.

In boardrooms where men look at your chest before your face. In garages where mechanics talk to your tits instead of your hands. In every male-dominated space you’ve ever occupied—which is all of them—your body arrived first and your competence showed up later, if anyone bothered to wait for it.

So you cover. You’ve always covered. Sports bras that flatten. Loose shirts. Jackets zipped to the collar. Layering until what’s underneath is a rumor instead of a statement.

You learned early that the less they see, the more they listen, and you made your peace with that trade-off before you were old enough to drive.

But the way he’s looking at you right now—

He’s not looking at your chest the way boardroom men do. Not cataloguing, not assessing, not calculating what your body means in relation to their power.

He’s looking at you like you just knocked the wind out of him.

Like you’re something he built in his head during long nights and lonely drives and now you’re real and the reality is so much more than the fantasy that his operating system crashed.

Something dangerous blooms in the pit of your stomach.

Something that wants to buy more bras like this one.

Something that wants lace and satin and sheer things that cost more than 1,800 yen—not for Rei, not for herself, but for him.

For this exact reaction.

For the way Park Jimin is standing in a mechanic bay with his mouth open and his brain offline because of a sale-rack bra and the body you’ve spent your whole life hiding.

That’s dangerous.

“Jaque?”

Nothing.

“Jaque.”

His mouth closes. Opens again. Closes.

Then he steps back.

Not toward you. Away.

One step. Two. Three. Turns on his heel and walks a tight circle in the middle of the bay, both hands coming up to lace behind his neck, elbows in, face tipped toward the ceiling.

“No,” he says to the rafters. “No, no, no. Nope.”

You blink.

“What?”

He keeps pacing.

His hands migrate from his neck to his face, press flat against his cheeks, drag down. Then back up to his hair. Then his neck again. A full circuit of self-soothing gestures that isn’t self-soothing at all.

“No mames.” He says it to himself. Under his breath. “No mames, no mames, no mames—” (No way, no way, no way—)

“What’s happening right now?”

He stops pacing.

Looks at you.

Looks at your chest.

Looks away. Fast. Like staring at the sun.

“Nope.” He walks another circle. Tighter. His hand comes down and adjusts himself through his jeans with zero subtlety. “Nope. No. This isn’t—I can’t—”

You’re sitting on the hood of your AE86, shirtless, in a white lace bra, watching a grown ass man who regularly drives at 300 kilometers per hour have a full mental breakdown because of your tits.

This is the funniest thing that’s ever happened to you.

“Are you… okay?”

“NO.” He says it immediately. Emphatically. His voice cracks on the single syllable. “No, Hachi, I’m not okay. I’m not—look at—you can’t just—”

He gestures at your chest. Both hands. Like he’s presenting evidence at trial.

“Mirá eso.” Back to Spanish. “Mirá. How is—why are they—how do they just sit like that—” (Look at that. Look)

“They’re boobs, Jaque. They sit because of the bra. That’s how bras work.”

“DON’T EXPLAIN BRAS TO ME RIGHT NOW.”

You press your lips together. Bite the inside of your cheek. Force your expression into something approaching neutral.

It doesn’t hold. The corner of your mouth twitches.

He sees it. Points at you.

“Don’t. Don’t you dare laugh.”

“I’m not laughing.”

“You’re about to laugh.”

“I’m really not.”

“Your face is doing the thing—”

“What thing—”

“THE THING where you’re trying not to and it makes it WORSE—”

A laugh escapes. You slap your hand over your mouth but it’s too late—the sound ricochets off the bay walls and he makes this noise of absolute despair.

“Yeah. Laugh it up.” He’s still pacing but slower now, orbiting like a satellite that can’t decide whether to crash or maintain altitude. “Real funny. Meanwhile I’m having a genuine medical emergency over here—”

“A medical emergency.”

“My brain just stopped working. That counts.”

“Because of my boobs.”

“Because of your—” He gestures again. Helplessly. “—yes. Those. In that—is that lace?”

“Yes.”

“White lace.”

“It was on sale.”

“On SALE,” he repeats. Like the concept of discount lingerie is personally offensive to him. “You’re telling me the thing that’s about to ruin my entire life cost you, what, 2,000 yen?”

“1,800.”

He crouches.

Just—drops. Right there in the middle of the mechanic bay. Sinks onto his heels, hands coming up and pressing together against his face—fingertips at his forehead, palms flat against his nose and mouth—like he’s gathering himself. Like he’s in confession. Like he’s physically holding his own skull together because whatever’s happening inside it requires structural support.

His eyes are squeezed shut above his pressed-together hands. Chest rising and falling too fast.

From the looks of it, you’d say he cannot believe he’s actually looking at your tits in a pretty white lace bra.

He’s not looking, technically. That’s the point of the crouch. He removed himself from the line of sight because the line of sight was doing critical damage.

You stare down at him from the hood.

“Did you just… crouch?”

“I’m processing.”

“On the floor?”

“It’s where my body decided to be right now and I’m not arguing with it.”

“You look like you’re praying.”

“I am praying.” His voice is muffled against his palms. “I’m praying for the strength to not do what I want to do right now because if I look up and see—I need a minute, Hachi.”

“A minute for what?”

“To convince my entire nervous system that we’re doing this properly and not like—”

“Animals in a mechanic bay?”

“Shut up.”

You grin. Full. Wide. The kind of grin you never let anyone see because it’s not controlled or measured or Hayashi-appropriate—it’s just happy.

Genuinely, stupidly happy because there’s a beautiful man crouched on a concrete floor having a crisis over your chest and for some reason that feels better than winning the race did.

His hands lower from his face. Just enough that his eyes appear above his fingertips. He glances up at you—one look, fast, like testing whether the sun’s still blinding—and immediately presses his hands back over his eyes.

“Yep,” he says. “Still there. Still in the bra. Cool cool cool.”

“They’re not going anywhere.”

“I’m aware. That’s the problem.” He swallows. You watch his throat bob above his pressed-together hands. “Hachi.”

“Yeah?”

“I need you to know that I am a respectful man.”

“You’re on the floor.”

“I’m a respectful man who is on the floor, yes.” A breath. “Both things are true.”

“Uh huh.”

“But I need you to also know—” His hands drop from his face. His eyes find yours. And whatever prayer he just said, it didn’t work, because the look in them is nothing close to holy. “—that if I don’t put my mouth on them in the next thirty seconds I think I might actually lose my mind.”

Your stomach free-falls.

“Okay. Get up.”

“I don’t think my legs work.”

“Jaque.”

“They genuinely might not—”

You push your boobs up and he rises immediately, like a moth drawn to a flame.

“Below the collar,” he says. More to himself than to you. A reminder. A rulebook. “Below the collar. Below the collar.”

“Mhm.”

“Okay.” He exhales. Shaky. His hands come up—hover near your waist without touching. “Okay. Can I—”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t finish asking.”

“The answer’s yes.”

His palms land on your waist. Warm. Slightly trembling.

They slide up.

Slowly. Over your ribs, over the edges of the bra’s band, fingertips tracing the lace where it meets skin. He follows the scalloped trim along the underside of the cup. Careful. Almost reverent.

Like he’s handling a component he’s never worked with before and doesn’t want to fuck up.

“Hachi,” he breathes.

“Yeah?”

“These—” His thumbs brush the swell above the cups. Just the top edges, where skin meets lace. “—these are insane.”

“They’re just boobs.”

“They’re not just anything.” He sounds personally insulted. “Don’t disrespect them like that ever again in front of me.”

“Are you seriously defending my boobs to me?”

“Someone has to. You clearly don’t appreciate them enough.”

“I live with them, Jaque. I appreciate them plenty.”

“You don’t.” His thumbs trace the lace edge again. “Trust me. You don’t appreciate them the way I’m about to.”

His eyes lift from your chest to your face. Dark. Focused. The theatrics draining away and something steadier replacing them—that locked-in concentration you’ve only seen when he races.

When he’s done calculating and he’s about to execute.

“Below the collar, right?” he asks.

“Right.”

“So…” His finger hooks under one bra strap. Draws it down your shoulder, one centimeter at a time. “…everything under here is mine.”

Your mouth goes dry.

“For tonight,” you correct.

Because boundaries. Because rules. Because you’re still you even with his hands on your skin and his breath on your collarbone.

He smiles. Slow.

“For tonight,” he agrees.

Then his mouth lowers to the top of your breast—right above the lace edge, right where the swell begins—and he presses his lips there. Open. Warm. The tip of his tongue tracing the line where fabric meets skin.

Your hand flies to the back of his head.

And the sound you make—quiet, involuntary, this soft ’ah’ that slips through your teeth—makes him groan against your skin like you’ve mounted him.

“Perfecta,” he murmurs into your chest. “Sos perfecta, Hachi. Sos—dios—” (Perfect. You’re perfect, Hachi. You’re—god—)

Spanish again. Vibrating against the swell of your breast.

You don’t need the translation.

Your legs wrap around his waist on reflex and your ass lands on the hood of the AE86 again. Harder this time. The metal groans under the impact and you feel the suspension compress a fraction beneath you.

His mouth is already on you, lips pressing open and hot against the top of your breast before your back even fully hits the hood. The left one. Right above the lace. Tongue tracing the swell, following the curve where flesh meets fabric, and the sound you make is something between a gasp and a curse.

"Déjame—" he murmurs against your skin. The words vibrate through your sternum. "Déjame que te lo haga bien, sí?" (Let me—let me do it to you right, yeah?)

You don't understand the words but you understand the tone. Low. Almost pleading. Like he's asking permission and making a promise at the same time.

Your hand finds the back of his head. Threads into his hair.

Yes. Yes. Whatever you're asking, yes.

He presses another kiss into the swell. Then another, lower, where the lace starts. His lips catch the edge of the fabric, pull it down a fraction with his teeth before releasing.

A tease. A warning shot.

Then he leans back.

Just—stops. Plants his hands on the hood beside your hips and looks at you.

Spread on your car's hood. Hair messy. Lips swollen from kissing.

At your chest. In that white lacey bra.

"Fuck," he says.

You wait.

"Fuck, man."

More waiting.

"This is—" He gestures. At you. At the bra. At the general concept of what's happening. His hand drops. Comes back up. Drops again. "—fuck."

"You said that."

"I'm gonna keep saying it." His voice is shot. Gravel and smoke and not enough oxygen. "Because—how are you—what is—" He shakes his head once. Hard. Like he's trying to reset a screen. "—fuck."

You've never rendered someone monosyllabic before.

It's doing things to your ego that probably aren't healthy.

His hand hooks his finger under the left strap. Draws it off your shoulder the same way he did earlier—lace sliding down your arm inch by inch.

Both straps down now. The bra's staying up through architecture alone—the cups doing their job, the band holding, but the structural integrity is compromised and you can feel it. Feel the looseness. Feel the way one deep breath would shift everything.

He pauses. His exhale comes out shaky. You can hear the tremor in it. See the way his chest stutters on the release, like his lungs forgot the sequence.

"Hachi," he says.

"Yeah."

"I'm gonna take this off now."

"Okay."

"And I need you to understand that whatever happens to my face when I do—that's involuntary. I have zero control over it. None. Just—have mercy."

The laugh bubbles up before you can stop it. "You're being very dramatic about a bra."

"You don't know what's under it."

"I literally live with what's under it."

"Exactly. You're desensitized. I'm not. I am the opposite of desensitized. I am sensitized. I am maximum sensitivity." His hands come back to your ribs. Fingertips finding the clasp at the back. "Ready?"

"Are you?"

"Absolutely not."

The clasp gives.

The tension releases. You feel it—the band loosening, the cups shifting, the structure that held everything in place surrendering its job.

He doesn't pull it off. Lets gravity do the work. The lace slides forward, caught for a second on your nipples—which are hard, because of course they are, because the air is cold and his hands are warm and every nerve in your body has been live-wired since the mountain—and then falls into your lap.

And you're bare.

The bay's ambient light hits your chest. Warm yellow glow on bare skin. On the full, heavy curve of breasts that you've spent your entire life covering, minimizing, apologizing for in every room full of men who looked before they listened.

Jimin doesn't make a sound.

His hands hover six inches from your skin, fingers slightly curled, palms open. Like he's warming himself at a fire he can't believe is real.

Then—quiet, almost to himself:

“Perfectas.” (Perfect [plural — referring to her breasts].)

The word comes out reverent. Broken at the seam. Merely said like a reflex. Like the sight of your bare breasts knocked a word out of him that he didn't choose and couldn't stop.

Both palms finally cup you from underneath, fingers spread, and the contact—his warm, calloused palms against the soft underside of your breasts—makes your breath hitch sharp enough to hear.

He holds you like you're something he pulled from a wreck and can't believe survived. Feeling the weight. Not squeezing, not kneading—just holding. Learning the shape, the temperature, the give of flesh against his hands.

"They're heavy," he says, like he’s dazed.

"Yeah." Your voice is thinner than you want it to be. "I know."

"No—that's not—I mean—" He shakes his head. His thumbs stroke along the curves. "I mean they're heavy. Like—they fill my whole hand. My whole hand, Hachi."

"Is that a complaint?"

"That's the furthest thing from a complaint that has ever existed in any language I speak." His thumbs follow the curve toward the center, toward the darker skin around your nipples. "I don't have words. In any of my nine languages. There are no words for this."

"You seem to be finding plenty."

"These are just sounds. My brain left."

His thumbs reach your areolas. Circle the edges. Not touching the nipple yet—orbiting. Mapping the perimeter.

Your nipples are so hard it's almost painful, tight peaks straining toward his hands, and he's right there and he won't—

"Jaque—"

"Shh." His eyes are fixed on his own hands. On your chest. He's watching his thumbs trace circles around your nipples like it's the most important engineering work he's ever done. "Shh. Let me—just let me—"

His thumb brushes your left nipple.

Finally.

The lightest touch—just the pad of his thumb dragging across the peaked skin—and the jolt that goes through you is completely disproportionate.

Your hand grabs his wrist. A sound escapes your mouth that you'd be embarrassed about if you could hear yourself over the rush of blood in your ears.

"Oh," he says softly. "Oh, you liked that."

You can't answer because he does it again. Same thumb. Same nipple. A slow, firm stroke that flattens the peak and releases it, and the nerve endings there light up like someone hit a switch connected to your entire central nervous system.

"Liked it a lot," he murmurs.

His other thumb mirrors the motion on the right. Simultaneous. Both nipples. Slow, synchronized strokes that make you want to bite your own hand.

"Nnh—fuck—"

“Tan sensible.” (So sensitive.)

He rolls both nipples between his thumb and forefinger. Gentle. Experimental. Testing the pressure, adjusting when you gasp, recalibrating when you moan. Mechanic's hands. Tuner's instincts. Reading feedback and responding in real time.

"You're so sensitive, Hachi. Right here, look at you—"

"Don't—ngh—don't narrate—"

"Why not?" He tugs gently. The sensation arrows straight down your body, landing between your legs like a current. "You were pretty chatty five minutes ago. All that ’me dan ganas’ talk."

"That was—ah—different—"

"Mhm."

He pinches. Light but precise.

You jolt.

"Different how?"

"I was wearing a shirt—"

"True. Terrible oversight. Should've taken it off earlier."

He releases your nipples. Cups you again—full palms, full weight—and squeezes. Not hard. Just enough to feel the give, to let the flesh spill between his fingers, to watch the way your breasts fill his hands and overflow them.

"I could do this forever," he says. Not to you. To your chest. Having a private conversation with your tits that you're not invited to. "Like—forever, Hachi. I would happily never do anything else again."

"You have to race."

"I would quit."

"No you wouldn't."

"I would quit racing." He looks up. Dead serious. "I would sell the R34, sell the Mustang, sell my kidneys, live under a bridge, and be completely at peace with all of it if it meant unlimited access to—" He looks back down. Squeezes again. "—these."

"You're unhinged."

"Your nipples are hard and your breathing's fucked up and you're calling me unhinged?"

Fair point.

His mouth lowers toward your left breast, lips parting, that focused intensity zeroing in on the nipple his thumb's been circling.

But he doesn't go straight for it.

Of course he doesn't.

Because Park Jimin is incapable of doing anything without making you wait for it first.

He kisses the inner curve. Soft. Lips dragging across skin, following the same path his thumb traced.

The contrast between his rough hands and his soft mouth makes you shiver—you can feel both, his palm still cupping the right breast while his lips worship the left.

Then his tongue comes out.

A flat, broad stroke from the underside of your breast to the top edge of your areola. Slow enough that you feel every millimeter. Wet enough that the air hits the trail he leaves and makes you shudder.

"Oh—"

He does it again. Same stroke. Same devastating pace. Tongue painting a line from the lower curve to the edge—but not the center, not the nipple, not where every nerve in your body is screaming at him to go.

"Jaque, if you don't—"

"If I don't what?" he says as he looks up at you through his lashes.

His mouth is still on your breas and still not where you want it. His lips are shiny. Eyes black. That cocky, infuriating ghost of a smile curving against your skin.

"Ask nice."

"I don't ask nice."

"Then I don't go where you want."

"You're insufferable—"

"And you're impatient."

His tongue traces the outer edge of your areola. Close. So close. The tip brushing the boundary of the darker skin without crossing it.

"Thought you were all about precision, Hachi. Careful technique. Reading the car. Savoring."

"That's for racing—"

"Same principles apply." He blows gently across the wet skin.

Your whole body clenches.

"I hate you," you whisper.

"Mmm. Try again."

Your fingers tighten in his hair. Pull. Not gently.

His groan vibrates against your breast.

"Please."

His mouth seals over your nipple.

The heat—the wet, sudden, encompassing heat—makes your vision white out for a full second. Your back arches hard, shoulders pressing into the hood, and the sound you make isn't a moan. It's closer to a sob. This raw, pulled-from-somewhere-deep thing that bounces off the bay walls and comes back unrecognizable.

He sucks. Gentle at first—just pressure, just warmth, his tongue flicking the peak while his lips hold the seal. Testing. Gauging your response the way he gauges tire grip—body feedback, micro-adjustment, finding the exact combination that makes you fall apart.

He finds it fast.

A rhythm. Suck, flick, release. Suck, flick, hold.

His free hand still cupping the right breast, thumb working the nipple in tandem, and the dual stimulation sends something cascading down your spine that has no name—just heat and pressure and a coiling in your lower stomach that feels dangerously, dangerously close to what happened in that twin bed.

"Fuck—Jimin—"

His name. His real name. And the effect is immediate—he sucks harder, moans against your breast, and his hips press forward between your legs in a reflexive thrust that grinds the hard ridge of him against you and—

"Oh—god—don't stop—"

He pulls off your nipple with a wet sound that makes your toes curl. Switches. His mouth finds the right one—tongue circling once, twice, then sealing over the peak—and his hand takes over on the left, cupping the spit-slick breast, thumb spreading the wetness, squeezing.

You're—

This is—

Your hips are moving, grinding against him in these small, involuntary rolls that you can't control and don't want to. Your hands are in his hair, gripping too hard probably, and your legs are locked around his hips pulling him closer and every time he sucks your inner walls clench around nothing and you're wet—you're really wet, you can feel it.

"Te gusta, Hachi?" he mumbles around your nipple. The vibration of his voice against the sensitive skin makes your thigh muscles shake. "Tell me you like it. Decime." (You like it, Hachi? Tell me.)

"I—nnh—"

"En serio." He pulls back just enough to speak and his lips brush the wet peak with every word. "Tell me. I wanna hear you say it." (Seriously)

"I like it," you breathe. "Fuck—I like it—"

"Good girl."

Your hips buck against him. Hard. His breath catches, his rhythm stutters, and for a second you're both just—pressed together, grinding, gasping, his mouth still on your breast and his hands full of you and the bay is quiet except for the sounds you're making which are not quiet at all.

He bites the swell of your left breast, the soft, full flesh above the nipple—sinking his teeth into the curve with a pressure that walks the exact line between pain and pleasure.

When he releases, there's a perfect crescent of indentations already flushing burgundy against your skin.

He looks at it.

Smiles.

Bites the other one. Same spot. Mirror image. Like he's signing his work.

"You're a freak," you manage. Your voice comes out thin. Breathless. Nothing like the woman who runs Daikoku. "How am I supposed to explain these to my fiancé?"

He doesn’t seem bothered by the reminder, ust shifts his mouth to a new patch of skin—the inner swell, where your breasts press together when you're dressed—and speaks against it.

"Don't let him see you naked." Simple. Flat. Like he's troubleshooting a mechanical problem, not addressing the fact that he's marking another man's fiancée in a parking lot. "What do I care."

And bites again.

Harder this time. Lower. Right where the curve of your breast meets your ribcage, soft tissue compressing under his teeth, and the sound that comes out of your mouth is not a protest.

His right hand leaves your breast.

You feel the loss of warmth immediately—but you don't have time to register the absence because his hand is traveling down. Along your ribs. Your waist. Your hip. The waistband of your leather pants.

His fingers find the zipper. The metal teeth part slowly.

His mouth comes back up. Finds yours. And this kiss is different from the ones before—slower, deeper, his tongue sliding against yours with a deliberation that contradicts the urgency in his hands. A kiss that's building a case.

He pulls back. Foreheads together. Breathing hard.

"Hachi."

"Hm."

His jaw works. You watch the muscle flex, watch him swallow, watch whatever he's about to say arrange itself into something he can get through without breaking.

"I have condoms."

Oh.

"Okay."

"On me. Right now."

"Okay."

"But I need—"

He stops. Breathes.

His hand is still at your waistband, fingers hooked inside the loosened leather, motionless.

Waiting.

"—I need you to tell me. Out loud. Because I'm—" Another breath. Harder. "—my control is not great right now, Hachi. It's really not great. And if you don't want to go further, I need to know now because in about thirty seconds I'm not going to be able to—"

"Jimin."

He stops mid-sentence.

Your hand finds his jaw. Tilts his face so he's looking directly at you. Into you. Past every wall and every deflection and every sharp line of banter you've been hiding behind since the first night he climbed through his own window.

"Stop treating me like I'm gonna break."

His throat bobs.

"I'm not a scaredy-cat." Your thumb traces his cheekbone. "I drove a car sideways through a gap at 80 tonight. I crushed a lollipop in front of the Tanaka twins and told them to kneel. I walked into this bay knowing exactly what was going to happen."

You hold his gaze.

"I'm here because I want to be here. I want you."

His breathing fractures.

"So yes." You bring your mouth to his, close so that the words land on his lips like a kiss that hasn't started yet. "I want you to fuck me, Jimin."

The sound he makes is torn from somewhere so deep it doesn’t have language attached to it—just vibration and need and the last thread of restraint finally, finally snapping.

His hand fists the leather at your waistband and pulls.

Leather doesn't cooperate. It never does. The material clings to your thighs, peeling slowly, requiring the kind of negotiation that would kill the mood if either of you cared about mood.

But you don't.

You lift your hips off the hood—bracing your palms against the cold metal—and he pulls, and together you shimmy the leather down past your thighs, your knees, your calves.

He yanks them along with your sneakers. Tosses them—somewhere. Behind him. Doesn't look where they land.

Then he reaches back.

One hand. To his back pocket. And pulls out a condom.

Not fumbling for it. Not digging around. He knew exactly which pocket, exactly where it was. The foil packet sits between his index and middle finger.

"Always carry those?" you ask.

"Since last week? Yeah." He doesn't miss a beat. "You texted me about your knees itching and my dick hitting your throat. I started carrying two."

"Two."

"Optimistic."

Despite everything—despite the fact that you're sitting on the hood of your AE86 in nothing but your underwear, chest bare, his bite marks blooming across your skin, his hard-on visible through his jeans—you laugh.

Short. Surprised out of you.

He grins. That stupid, incandescent, completely disarming grin that makes him look younger.

He sets the condom on the hood beside your hip. Within reach. Then his hands come to the hem of his own shirt.

He pulls it off in one motion. Over his head. Arms crossing, fabric peeling, and then it's gone and he's standing in front of you bare-chested in a mechanic bay and—

You've seen him shirtless before. That night in his room when he was changing and you caught a flash of his back. But that was a glimpse. Dark room. Quick.

This isn't quick.

This is every tattoo you've only heard rumors about spread across a canvas of tan skin and lean muscle. The racing stripe down his spine. The Vitruvian man across his shoulder blade, but different—modified with a tachometer halo. Spanish text you can't read winding through Buenos Aires street grids. Something in Japanese on his ribs. Cherry blossoms and a torii gate across his right shoulder, and below it—

A scar.

Across his ribcage on the left side. Long, healed, ridged.

Your fingers reach for it before you think.

He catches your wrist. Gentle.

"Later," he says. Not shutting it down. Just—redirecting. 

That's a conversation. Not now.

You nod.

His hands go to his jeans. Button. Zipper. The denim loosening around his hips and you see the V-lines you traced with your fingers earlier now in full—defined, disappearing below the waistband of black boxer briefs that are doing absolutely nothing to conceal how hard he is.

Your mouth goes dry.

He catches you looking. Of course he does.

"See something you like, Hachi?"

"Shut up and get over here."

His grin sharpens. He steps forward. Between your knees. Hands finding the tops of your thighs, palms warm and calloused, and the skin-on-skin contact—his bare torso against your bare chest—sends a current through you that makes your abs clench.

Your breasts press against his chest. Nipples still sensitized from his mouth, from his tongue, from the attention he's been lavishing on them for the past however-many minutes. The friction of his skin against yours—warm, slightly rough with hair—is a different sensation entirely. Less targeted. More encompassing. A full-body contact that makes you want to climb into him.

His forehead drops to yours.

"You're shivering," he murmurs.

"I'm not cold."

"I know."

His hand slips between your bodies. Travels south. Over your stomach—the muscles jumping at his touch, every nerve you own apparently now hardwired to respond to his fingers on autopilot. Over the waistband of your underwear. And he presses his palm flat against your clit through the fabric.

The sound you make is not subtle.

It's a gasp that cracks open into something longer and more desperate, your hips rolling up into his hand, and the pressure of his palm against your clit—even through cotton—sends a shockwave of sensation that makes your vision blur at the edges.

"God—" Your hand grabs his wrist. Not to stop him. To keep him there. "—right there—right there—"

"I know." His fingers press firmer. Feeling you through the fabric. "Fuck—Hachi, you're soaked."

Heat floods your face.

Because you are. You can feel it—the wetness that's been building since he started speaking Spanish, since the mountain, since his mouth found your breast.

The cotton between his hand and your skin is damp and getting worse with every roll of your hips.

"You—" He makes a guttural sound.

His fingers shift, exploring through fabric, finding the shape of you, and when his middle finger drags along your slit through wet cotton you hear him exhale like he's been punched.

"You're so responsive. I barely touched you and you're—mierda—"

He doesn't know.

Doesn't know that before him, responsive wasn't a word that applied.

He doesn't know that his thumb through pajama pants four days ago was the first time you had an orgasm in your life.

And now his hand is between your legs and you're soaked and every nerve ending is firing and your hips are grinding into his palm without your permission because your body learned something new that night in his twin bed and it's been starving for more ever since.

"You're so sensitive," he says, almost to himself.

His fingers tracing your folds through the cotton, mapping what he can feel.

"Right here—" His finger brushes across the spot where the Christina piercing sits and you jolt. "—fuck, right here, every time I touch it you—"

"It's—nnh—the piercing—"

"I know." He presses his thumb there. Holds it. Feels the metal bar through the fabric. "I know, Hachi. I remember."

He remembers.

Of course he remembers. He's a mechanic. He found the modification and he's been thinking about it ever since—where it sits, what it does, how it makes you react.

He's probably been lying awake at night reverse-engineering the optimal way to use it against you.

His thumb circles.

Slow. Over the piercing.

Your hand fists in his hair, and the sound you make has no consonants in it—just this open, vowel-heavy thing that bounces off the walls.

"That's it," he breathes against your mouth. "That's the sound. That's the one."

"Jimin—I need—"

"I know what you need."

He peels the underwear off. No ceremony. Just hooks his fingers in the waistband and drags them down, and the cold air hits slick skin and your thighs press together on instinct before his hands guide them apart again.

"No." Gentle but firm. His palms on your inner thighs, pressing outward. "Don't hide. Not from me."

You let him look.

You let Park Jimin stand between your spread knees in a mechanic bay at 1 AM and look at you—bare, wet, every part of your body exposed below the collarbone where his bite marks end and Rei's ignorance begins.

His thumb traces your hip bone. Down. Following the crease of your thigh. Close but not touching where you need him to.

"Beautiful," he says. Not performing. Not trying to be smooth. Just stating a fact in the same tone he uses to describe engine specs. "You're—every part of you is—"

His voice breaks off.

He picks up the condom.

Tears the foil with his teeth. One quick rip.

And your heart rate doubles. Because this is it. This is the line. Everything before was prologue—the texting, the offer, the twin bed, the mountain, the Spanish, the bites and the grinding and the ’me-dan-ganas.’

This is the part where it becomes real.

He pushes his boxers down. His cock springs free and your brain registers several things at once: the length, the slight upward curve, the way it twitches when the cold air hits it, the fact that he's thick enough that the logistics portion of your brain—the part that calculates clearances and tolerances for a living—immediately starts running numbers.

He rolls the condom on.

Then he looks at you.

"Last chance," he says quietly.

"If you ask me one more time I'm going to punch you harder than you punched Shinji."

His laugh is surprised out of him. Real. It crinkles his eyes and shows his teeth and makes him look like the boy who gives his brothers the bigger bedrooms and sends money home after every race.

"Okay," he says. "Okay."

He steps closer.

His hands find your hips. Adjust you on the hood—shifting your ass to the edge, tilting your pelvis, and you recognize what he's doing because it's the same thing you do with cars.

Finding the angle. Optimizing the approach. Making sure everything lines up before the throttle drops.

You feel the head of his cock press against your entrance. Just pressure. Just there. Warm through the latex.

Your body pulses around nothing, clenching, wanting, and you hear yourself inhale sharp through your nose.

His forehead meets yours.

"Ready?" he murmurs.

"Jimin."

"Yeah?"

"_Put it in"

His exhale shakes against your mouth.

“Yeah,” he breathes. “Yeah, okay—”

He pushes in, inch by inch, the stretch of him filling you in a way that makes your mouth fall open and your nails find his shoulders and your brain go completely, catastrophically blank.

Because—

Oh.

Oh, that’s—

You’ve had sex before. You’ve had sex plenty of times. With Rei, in nice beds with nice sheets, and it was fine. It was always fine. Comfortable. Familiar.

This isn’t that.

This is your legs tightening around his hips, pulling him deeper because your body wants more before your brain has finished processing enough.

He bottoms out.

Stills.

His forehead drops against yours. His breath comes in ragged bursts against your lips. His arms are shaking where they brace against the hood—that same tremor from before, except now he’s inside you and you can feel it everywhere.

“Tight,” he manages. “Hachi—you’re—fuck—”

You clench around him. Not on purpose. Involuntary. Your walls fluttering in these small, rhythmic contractions that you can’t control and didn’t know your body did.

His hips jerk. Forward. Half an inch deeper that shouldn’t be possible and a sound punches out of your chest—

“Ah—”

High. Thin. Needy in a way that makes your face burn because who made that noise. That wasn’t you. You don’t make noises like that. You’ve never made noises like that in your life. With Rei you were quiet. Controlled. Occasionally a soft exhale or a practiced moan timed to his rhythm because that’s what you were supposed to do, wasn’t it? Make the right sounds at the right times. Perform.

This isn’t performing.

This is your body making sounds without your permission because Park Jimin is inside you and your nervous system has apparently been asleep for years and just woke up screaming.

He starts to move, slow at first. Long pulls that drag the length of him against your walls—out until just the tip remains, then back in, deep, bottoming out with a controlled roll of his hips that makes the 86’s suspension creak beneath you.

“You feel—” His voice is wrecked. Shattered at the seams. “—Hachi, you feel increíble—”

He thrusts again. Deeper. The angle shifts and the head of his cock drags against something inside you that makes your legs lock tight around his waist.

“Oh—oh god—”

Too loud. Way too loud.

Your hand flies to your own mouth—

He catches your wrist. Pulls it away.

“Don’t.” His eyes find yours. Dark, focused, that laser-lock intensity he gets behind the wheel. “I told you. I want to hear you.”

“I’m being—nnh—loud—”

“Good.” He thrusts. “Be loud.”

“People will—ah—”

“Nobody’s coming back here, Hachi.”

Another thrust. Harder. Your back slides against the hood and he pulls you back by the hips, flush against him.

“And even if they did—” His mouth finds your ear. “—you’d still be making those sounds. Porque me encantan.” (Because I love them.)

The Spanish in your ear while he’s inside you short-circuits something fundamental in your wiring.

A whimper escapes. Actual whimper.

One of those sounds you’ve mocked in movies, that you thought was exaggerated, the kind that’s apparently just what happens when someone fucks you right for the first time in your life.

Your face burns.

Not from arousal—from embarrassment.

Because you sound desperate. You sound needy.

You sound like everything you’ve spent all your life proving you’re not—the soft girl, the fragile girl, the type of girl who would fall apart when a man touched her right.

You immediately yank him down, both hands fisting in his hair, pulling him forward until his face is buried against your shoulder and yours is buried against his.

Your nose pressed into the junction of his neck and collarbone where he smells like hinoki and sweat and sex, and your mouth is muffled against his skin so the sounds you can’t stop making at least go somewhere that isn’t the open air of the mechanic bay.

He adjusts. Doesn’t question it. Just shifts his weight, plants one hand on the hood by your head, and keeps moving—keeps fucking you with those slow, devastating strokes that somehow hit deeper at this angle.

“Ahí—ahí te gusta, ¿no?” (That’s where you like it, huh?) he murmurs against your shoulder. You feel his lips move against your skin with each word. “Right here? This angle?”

You nod against his neck. Can’t speak. Don’t trust what would come out if you tried.

“Mhm.”

He does it again. Same stroke, same depth, same spot. Your walls clamp down on him and his breath catches.

“Yeah. Right there. Te vuelve loca, ¿verdad?” (Makes you crazy, right?)

You whimper against his throat. Sink your teeth into the muscle of his shoulder to muffle it.

“Ngh—” His hips stutter. “—do that—do that again, nena, mordeme—” (bite me)

You bite harder. His groan vibrates through his chest into yours. His pace picks up—not faster, just firmer.

Your heels dig into the small of his back, sneakers pressing into the muscle above his ass, locking him close, keeping him deep.

Because every time he pulls back you feel the loss like a physical ache and your body says ’no, more, closer, stay.’

“Mírate,” (Look at you) he breathes against your hair. “So greedy, Hachi. Pulling me in with your legs like you can’t get enough—”

“Shut—ah—shut up—”

“¿Por qué? (Why?) If you could hear yourself right now—the little noises you make when I go deep—” He punctuates it with a thrust that drives the air from your lungs. “—esos ruiditos, nena. Me vuelven loco.” (Those little noises, nena. They make me crazy.)

You don’t understand the words. Don’t need to. The stupid Spanish is doing something to you that transcends translation.

“You’re close,” he says. Not a question.

And the terrifying thing is he’s right.

You’re close. Already. Embarrassingly, devastatingly close. The coil that’s been building since his mouth was on your breasts—since the mountain, since the Spanish rant, since four days ago in his twin bed—is wound so tight now that each thrust sends tremors through your thighs and your stomach muscles are clenching in rhythmic pulses that you can’t stop.

His hand finds your thigh. Grips it. Angles you just so—tilting your hips an extra degree that puts pressure on the front wall and the piercing simultaneously and—

“Ngh—fuck!—”

Your legs lock around him so hard your calves cramp. And the sound you make—this raw, cracked, open-throated thing—fills the mechanic bay and echoes back at you like evidence of a person you don’t recognize.

“That’s it—” His voice is strained. Marveling. “Come on, Hachi—come on—dale, dale—”

“I can’t—I’m going to—Jimin—”

“Sí—sí, así—say my name when you cum—decí mi nombre—”

The coil snaps.

Not the slow build-and-release from the twin bed. This is a crash.

Your whole body seizing, walls clamping down on him in hard, rhythmic contractions that make him curse, your spine arching, your fingers raking lines down his back through bare skin that you distantly know will be there tomorrow.

Your heels drive into his lower back so hard he grinds impossibly deep and holds there while you break apart around him.

“Ji—min—oh god—oh—”

His name in your mouth. Fragmented. Shattering like sugar under a boot heel.

The waves keep coming. One after another, rolling through your body in these full-system pulses that make your toes curl inside your sneakers and your thighs tremble against his hips.

You’re clenching on him—gripping his cock in spasms that you can feel and he can definitely feel because his breathing’s gone haywire against your shoulder.

“Mierda—Hachi—you’re—fuck—”

He thrusts slowly to help you ride it out while your body squeezes and releases and squeezes again around him and the aftershocks ripple through you in diminishing waves that leave you boneless against the hood.

Your arms are still around his neck. Trembling.

Your face is still pressed into his shoulder.

You’re not ready to come out yet.

Because if you look at him right now—if you see whatever expression is on his face—you might have to acknowledge what just happened.

That you came in maybe four minutes of penetrative sex after more than two decades of assuming your body didn’t work that way.

His hand comes up. Cups the back of your head. Holds you against him.

“Holy shit,” he says into your hair. Quiet. Almost awed. “That was—Hachi, that was fast.”

Your face burns hotter.

“I’ve never—”

He pulls back slightly. You tighten your arms.

“—gotten anyone there that quick before.”

‘Because nobody’s ever gotten me there at all,’ you don’t say.

“Not that I’m complaining.” You can hear the grin forming. Can hear the ego inflating in real time. “That’s—I mean—that’s gotta be some kind of record, right?”

“Don’t.”

“I’m just saying—”

“Don’t.”

“Four minutes, Hachi. Maybe less. I didn’t even get to—”

“If you finish that sentence I will murder you.”

He laughs. Warm. Against your hair. The sound rumbling through his chest into yours, and your over-sensitized body responds to even that—the vibration making you clench around him, still inside you, still hard.

His breath hitches.

“Okay,” he says. Steadier. His hand strokes your hair once. “Okay. But I’m—I need you to know that my ego just grew about six sizes and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

You bite his shoulder again. Gentler this time. A reprimand.

He hisses. Grins against your temple.

Swallows. You hear it—the thick, dry click of his throat working, the effort of it. Like he’s swallowing down everything his body wants to do and replacing it with something slower.

His hips shift. Start moving again.

Different now.

He’s not chasing your orgasm anymore.

He’s chasing his.

And the difference is something you feel in your spine.

Because when he was focused on you, every stroke was a question—’here? like this? is that good?’ Now each thrust is a statement. Selfish in a way that should make you feel used but instead makes your stomach drop, because there’s something unbearably hot about Park Jimin losing the choreography and just taking.

But then he slows. Just barely.

“Can I—” A breath. His hips grind forward, slow, deep, and the groan he makes is bitten off at the end. “—Hachi, can I go harder?”

You nod. Sheepish. Small. Arms tightening around his neck, heels digging into his lower back, pulling him closer because the embarrassment of wanting this is somehow easier when there's less space between you and him.

He reads the nod.

He goes harder.

And harder is—fuck, harder is a whole different animal. The first thrust at the new pace drives you back against the hood a full inch before his palm catches your hip and hauls you flush again. Deeper. Your breath leaves you on a sound that's more air than syllable.

You bury your face harder into his shoulder.

Nose pressed into the curve where his neck meets collarbone, mouth hidden against the heat of his skin, breasts mashed flush to his bare chest—soft into hard, the slide of sweat between you making everything slick.

You can feel his heartbeat hammering against yours.

Two engines out of sync.

His pace stutters. He lifts his head.

"Huh?"

Just that. Soft. The sound of him noticing.

"Hachi."

You shake your head against his shoulder.

"You going shy on me?"

You shake it harder. His laugh is breathless, broken in the middle by his own hips driving forward, by the grunt it punches out of him.

"You are." His hand slides up your spine, warm palm flat between your shoulder blades. "Nah, nah, nah. Where'd all that attitude go, huh? Five minutes ago you were—mmh—running your mouth at me. Me dan ganas, poor baby—now what?"

"Sh—shut up—"

"Ah, so that’s how you wanna do it."

He thrusts deeper. The angle tilts and that same thin high thing keeps slipping out of your throat without permission, and you make a sound of pure mortification against his neck, teeth catching his skin.

His hips jerk. Sharp. Out of rhythm.

"Puta madre—" (Motherfucker—)

His forehead drops to your temple. Breathing hard into your hair.

"Don't do that. Don't—Hachi, don't bite me and make that noise at the same time, I'm gonna—" A shaky exhale. "—lose the fucking plot. I swear to god."

You whimper. You don't mean to. It just—happens. Leaks out of you when he bottoms out and grinds, and the sound is small and high and needy in a way that lights your face on fire because you have never in your life made a noise like that.

Not once.

Not with anyone.

And now you've made it three times in the last minute and you can't stop.

"Fuck—" His voice drops. Ragged. "—okay, okay, okay—that sound, Hachi, Jesus Christ—"

He thrusts harder.

You whimper again. Higher.

"Mierda—again, otra vez, do that again for me—"

"I'm not—" Cracked. Muffled against his shoulder. "—I'm not doing anything—"

"Escuchate, (listen to yourself,) all these little—mmh—these little noises in the back of your throat—cada uno, (every one,) Hachi—"

His hand slides down, grabs your ass, angles you against his next thrust.

You burn hotter and press your face harder into his shoulder and your heels dig into his lower back, like if you just stay hidden, just keep him deep, just muffle everything against him, this new traitorous body of yours won't give you away.

"Hachi." He's panting. "Hachi, lean back—lemme—"

You shake your head.

"C'mon. Lemme see you."

"No."

"No?" A laugh. Incredulous. Ruined. "You telling me no right now? Squeezing me like this and telling me no?"

"Jimin."

The way his name cracks out of you—strangled, begging—does something to him.

His rhythm falters.

A groan sinks into your hair.

"Okay—okay—" His hand comes up, cups the back of your head, gentle in a way that doesn't match the rest of him. "Okay, mami. Shh. C'mere. Hang on."

He leans back just enough to get a hand between you, the other arm locked around your waist. He doesn't stop moving—keeps those slow, deep rolls of his hips going while he drags his thumb across the corner of your mouth.

"Open."

You blink at him.

Pupils blown. Mouth red. Hair falling in his eyes, a flush crawling up his throat, and he's looking at you like you hung the sun and made it shine just for him.

"Need something to muffle you, beba?" Thumb pressed gentle on your lower lip. "Open up. Chupá." (Suck.)

Oh.

Oh.

Your lips part. You don't decide to. Your body just—does it. His thumb slides into your mouth, warm, tasting like sweat and the salt of his skin, and your tongue meets the pad of it.

His eyes go dark.

"Dios." (God.)

You close your lips around it. Suck. Following the instruction because it gives your mouth something to do that isn't sounds you can't control.

His hips grind deep and hold there and he just—watches your mouth work around his thumb, and the noise that leaves him is pitched so low you feel it more than hear it.

"That's it." His voice has gone rough as asphalt. "Así. That's it, beba. Suck on it for me." (Like that.)

Your eyes flutter.

"Yeah?" A slow, ruined smile. "Tenés algo en la boca, ya no pensás tanto, ¿no?" (Got something in your mouth, can't think so much now, huh?)

You don't catch the words. You catch the tone. Low, indulgent, unbearably pleased. You suck harder around his thumb and whimper—and watch him break.

"Ay hijo de puta—" (Son of a bitch—)

His hips slam forward. Out of rhythm. His head drops back, throat bared, cords standing out.

"You're supposed to be—shh—quiet—" A laugh, winded. "—that's the whole point, beba. Carajo, Hachi, even with my fingers in your mouth you're loud as fuck, you know that? Me tenés re mal, te juro—" (You've got me so bad, I swear—)

He drags his thumb down, tugs your lip, pushes it back in. You suck. Automatic. A small moan vibrates around his knuckle.

"Mmph—" His eyes squeeze shut. "—sí, así—dios mío—" (yes, like that—my god—)

Your hands find his shoulders. Nails digging in. He's leaking—you can feel him twitch inside you, feel how hard he's holding himself, and the pace he was keeping stutters into something desperate.

His free hand drops between you.

Not to get you off. You're too raw for that—your first one is still shimmering through you in little aftershocks, your thighs still trembling, your stomach still fluttering. He knows better than to push you there again.

His fingers find the barbell instead.

The Christina. That small silver thing that lives just above everything else. His thumb presses flat over it—just once, just there—and he makes a sound like he's been reminded of something holy.

"Puta madre—" (motherfucker—) Low. Reverent. "—sigue ahí. (still there.) Hachi. This fucking—"

His voice fractures. He presses his thumb to the metal again. Just feeling it. Just proving to himself it's real, you're real, you're here, his, open around him, mouth full of his other thumb, this small piece of silver flush to your skin.

"No puedo—" (I can't—) "—Hachi, I can't, I'm—"

His rhythm collapses. Sloppy. Deep. Panting, and his thumb has slipped out of your mouth slick and trailing spit down your chin, and his whole body is going taut against yours.

"—me vengo—" (I'm cumming—) Urgent. Ragged. His hand fists in your hair. "—Hachi, beba, I'm—me voy a venir—(I'm gonna cum—) Hachi, c'mere, c'mere—"

His mouth crashes against yours open and wet and sloppy and he moans into you—this long, broken, involuntary sound that pours straight down your throat as his hips stutter and drive deep and stay there. His whole body going tight. Shaking. One hard grinding pulse and then—

"Mmph—ah—Hachi—fuck—"

He's talking into your mouth. Cumming and moaning and you can feel the words vibrate against your tongue in half-syllables and broken Spanish that doesn't connect to Spanish anymore.

"—tan—(so—) puta madre—(motherfucker—) tan linda—(so pretty—) ah, ah—"

His hand tightens in your hair. Hips grind deep. He spurts inside the condom in pulses you can feel, and each one jerks another fractured sound out of him—high, almost whiny, noises of a man who's been holding something back for longer than he'll ever admit.

You kiss him through it, swallowing every wrecked sound, your tongue sliding against his in a mess of spit and groans, his breath stuttering against your lips as the last pulse works through him. He's shaking. Actually shaking. His forehead presses to yours and his mouth doesn't leave yours even when the words stop—just keeps kissing you, sloppy and missing the aim half the time, catching the corner of your mouth, your chin, your lower lip, back to your mouth again.

"Hijo de—" (Son of a—) He laughs against your mouth. Cracked. "—dios mío. (my god.) Hachi. Hachi. Holy fuck—"

You can't speak.

He can't either, apparently, because for a good ten seconds all he does is breathe into your mouth, short ragged pulls of air, his whole body trembling where it's pressed against yours. His chest heaving against yours—your nipples still hard against his sternum, that soft-and-hard contact that made him lose it the first time and is apparently still doing something to him, because his cock twitches weakly inside you and he groans into your mouth like it hurts.

Then he collapses. Not fully—he catches himself. Forearms hitting the hood on either side of your head, body curving over yours like a bridge that just lost structural integrity.

You lie there. Under him. On the hood of your AE86. In the mechanic bay of Daikoku at—you have no idea what time it is. One? Two?

The lot’s probably clearing out by now. The race, the twins, the confrontation—all of it feels like it happened in another lifetime.

His forehead finds the dip between your breasts. Rests there.

Breathes.

You feel each exhale—warm, damp, slowing incrementally as his body comes back to earth. His hand is now on your breast. Palm flat. His thumb making the smallest unconscious stroke against the outer curve.

Your fingers find his hair. Card through it. Gently.

He makes a sound. Not words. Just this soft, humming exhale that vibrates through your sternum.

After a while—seconds? minutes?—he turns his face. Presses his cheek against the inner swell. Eyes closed.

“Hey,” he murmurs.

“Hey.”

“I think you broke me.”

“I think you dented my hood.”

His laugh is airless. Barely there. You feel it more than hear it—his chest shaking against your stomach, his breath stuttering.

“Worth it.”

“My mechanic’s going to have questions.”

“Tell him a really heavy guy leaned on it.”

“You’re not that heavy.”

“Tell him a moderately heavy guy leaned on it with extreme enthusiasm.”

You huff, fingers still moving through his hair.

“Hachi.”

“Mm.”

His nose burrows into the crook of your neck. A long, slow inhale through his nose, like he’s pulling your scent into his lungs and holding it there.

Then he exhales, warm and loose against your throat. Content. Almost happy, which is a word you wouldn’t normally associate with Park Jimin but there it is—happy, sated, his body heavy and slack on top of yours.

“So,” he murmurs into your neck. “Guess I should start drafting that marriage proposal, huh?”

You snort, graceless and immediate and you feel his grin spread against your skin before you can take it back.

Because you remember. That morning in his kitchen, standing in his pajama pants with egg mayo on the counter.

«Nah. That comes after actual sex.»

“Told you,” he says, and the smugness is audible. “Told you there’d be actual sex.”

“You didn’t tell me anything. You implied.”

“And I delivered.”

He lifts his head just enough to look at you. Hair wrecked. Lips bitten. Eyes soft and stupid and pleased with himself in a way that makes you want to kiss him and shove him off the car simultaneously.

“Under-promise, over-deliver. That’s the Jaque guarantee.”

“You’re disgusting.”

“You came in four minutes.”

“I will end you—”

He ducks down and bites your tit. Same spot he marked earlier. More of a nip than a bite.

But your body doesn’t know the difference—a sound escapes, and his laugh vibrates against your chest in a way that’s going to haunt you for weeks.

“Knew it,” he says into your skin. “So sensitive.”

He presses one last kiss to the mark.

Then he leans back. Pulls out—careful, slow, that brief wince of separation that you feel in your overstimulated walls—and deals with the condom while you blink at the ceiling and try to remember how your legs work.

Shop rag. Tied off. Tossed toward the trash with an arc that misses by a solid meter.

He doesn’t pick it up. Just stares at where it landed on the concrete.

“I’ll get it later.”

“You absolutely won’t.”

“I absolutely won’t.”

You push yourself up on your elbows. The hood’s warm under your forearms—body heat and friction and the ghost of everything that just happened soaked into the metal. Your AE86 is never going to feel the same again. Every time you rest your hand on this hood you’re going to think about—

Don’t think about it.

He’s pulling his boxers up. Jeans follow. The button takes two attempts because his hands are still slightly unsteady, which you notice and file away as a private victory.

His shirt comes next. Black cotton swallowing the tattoos, the scratches you left on his back, the Buenos Aires street grid and the cherry blossoms and the scar on his ribs.

All of it disappearing under fabric like a secret the world isn’t allowed to see.

He rakes a hand through his hair. Doesn’t fix it. It stays fucked up.

Then he looks at you—still propped on your elbows on the hood, shirtless, bite marks darkening on your tits, hair a disaster, and probably wearing an expression that’s way too open for someone who runs this parking lot.

“Drive you home?” he asks.

Simple. No performance. No innuendo.

You hum. “Sure.”

He nods. Grabs your shirt, panties and pants from the floor, your bra from wherever it migrated to during the proceedings, and holds both out without commentary.

You take them. He turns around—actually turns around, gives you his back while you dress, like this is the part that requires privacy and not the part where he had your nipple between his teeth two minutes ago.

Idiot.

Sweet, stupid idiot.

You clasp the bra. Pull the shirt over your head. The fabric settles against skin that’s still buzzing, still warm, still covered in evidence of him that nobody above the collar will ever see.

The leather pants take effort. They always take effort, but post-sex they take unreasonable effort, and you end up doing that ridiculous shimmy-hop thing that makes you look like a seal trying to climb onto a rock.

He hears the noise. Turns. Watches the last three inches of leather-versus-thigh warfare with an expression of pure delight.

“Need a hand?”

“I need you to stop looking.”

“Not a chance.”

You yank the waistband into place. Zip up. Fix your hair with your fingers because there’s no mirror and it probably doesn’t matter anyway.

He’s already at the bay entrance when you grab your keys. Leaning against the frame with his hands in his pockets. Watching you walk toward him.

Not satisfied. Not smug.

Just—looking at you. Like he wants to remember exactly how you look right now, walking toward him through a mechanic bay at whatever-the-fuck AM, in the aftermath of something neither of you has a name for.

You stop in front of him.

“So.”

“So.”

The night air drifts in from the lot. Cold. Carrying the faint smell of rubber and cigarette smoke and the last traces of a crowd that’s long since scattered.

“Same time next week?” he asks. That grin starting at the corner of his mouth.

“Don’t push it.”

“That’s not a no.”

“That’s a go home, Jaque.”

“I’m literally offering to drive you.”

“Then drive me. Less talking.”

His grin cracks open. Full. That stupid, incandescent thing that makes him look like a boy instead of the man who just fucked you on the hood of your car.

“Vámonos, entonces.” (Let’s go, then.)

He pushes off the frame. Walks toward the R34. You follow—half a step behind, keys in your hand, the ache between your legs a low, warm reminder of what just happened every time your sneakers hit pavement.

The R34 smells like leather and hinoki and him.

You sink into the passenger seat. The leather’s cold through your clothes. It’ll warm up.

He starts the engine, Skyline settling into a low idle that vibrates through the chassis.

Neither of you speaks. Neither of you needs to.

He drives. Through Daikoku’s empty lot, past the shuttered konbini, onto the main road where Tokyo’s nighttime infrastructure takes over—traffic lights cycling for no one, vending machines glowing on empty sidewalks, the occasional taxi cruising the lanes like a shark through shallow water.

Your head rests against the window. Glass cool on your temple. The city scrolling past in streaks of neon and sodium and the soft blue of closed shopfronts.

And you think—quietly, in the private space between your reflection and the glass—

So that’s what it’s supposed to feel like.

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[back2bluesidex]

Caught in a Lie - PJM [18+]

Pairing: Super model, Boyfriend Jimin X Criminal Lawyer, Fem Reader

Theme: Angst, hurt to comfort au, establish relationship au.

Summary:

In which Jimin lies to you about meeting his ex-girlfriend and you find it out from a common friend.

Total Word count: 5k

Warnings: lying, hospital, Jimin is a good boy, he is just too good to tell people no, reader is suffering, allusion to sex, fluff. this is not too angsty actually.

Minors Do Not Interact!

Masterlinks | Patreon (this one is already posted in Patreon, so, if you want, you can read the story right away)

A/N:🫶

They say no relationship is ever balanced. 

There will always be one who loves more than the other. There will always be the one who gives more than the other. There will always be the one who compromises more than the other. 

You don’t mind to be the ‘one’ in question - because for Jimin, all of it comes from within. 

Yes, there are days that are bleak, that are as scattered as fine dust. There are days when you wish to receive as well, when you wish to be celebrated as well, but feelings like that don’t stay for long.  

Jimin is not indifferent by any means - but he is too busy, often too bright for you. He brings so much that you don’t know what to keep and what to let go. 

His world is the center of chaos, all while you like to reside in the calm, in the tranquility, in the adverse current of the flow. 

Many would say you two are a bad match - a popular super model and a criminal lawyer. But you know better. You know the joy you feel when you come back home to his scent rafting around your apartment. 

You know the love you feel when he ditches his club nights to be with you after a long, demanding day. 

You know the emotions that swell up in your eyes when he leaves sweet hand-written notes right on the filled sanitary container because you forgot to buy yourself your needs again.

And hence, those bleak days, those moments of wishing for more and gaining a little less, can never stand tall before the amount of love you receive from your boyfriend. Despite all the differences, you two thrive in your own tide. 

Nevertheless, tides too can turn into whirlpools and whirlpools often end in destruction. Hence, you try your best to stay afloat, even when your heart starts hurting a little too much. 

Just like right now. 

It’s been more than two weeks since you have seen your boyfriend. He is out participating in Paris fashion week and you are here watching paparazzi posting just a new picture of him every single day. 

He texts you often or at least once a day because he is just too busy to even eat proper meals. But it’s okay. You are used to this rush of his life. You are used to this absence. You know it’s a matter of a few hours before he is here, before he is hustling through the door of your shared space and picking you up and kissing you on the mouth - making up for all the time that was lost. 

You take a look at your watch to find out that it’s already four in the afternoon. You can not wait to go back home and start preparing the dinner. 

Jimin is landing very soon. Although he forgot to text you - you got notification from the airlines that the airplane has started its journey and will land in Incheon by eight at night. 

Letting your eyes wander out of the vast floor to ceiling window of the office - you try to picture your boyfriend’s angelic face on the clouds. 

Cliche, right? But everything is fair when your partner is as charming as Park Jimin. 

Jimin has started gaining global recognition long ago. However, he hasn’t changed even a bit. He still loves kimchi jjigae the best and looks for a bowl of steaming rice to fill his stomach whenever he comes home after a work schedule overseas. 

Today is not going to be any different for sure. So you start preparing the said comfort food of your boyfriend as soon as you arrive home from work. 

Maybe it’s because you are suddenly too focused on cooking or maybe you just couldn’t comprehend how time flies by too fast these days - it’s already ten in the night when you finish preparing all the banchan and start plating the food. 

As you take a look at the clock again, you frown. Jimin should have been here already. It should not take more than an hour for him to reach home. Is he stuck in traffic? Given the fact that it’s Friday and everyone is out partying the night, he might have gotten stuck in an unexpected traffic jam. 

Wait - he must have called you several times. You put your phone on charge in the bedroom and forgot it there. 

Running towards the bedroom, you retrieve your phone only to find not even a single text. Now this is certainly something to be worried about. Was the flight delayed? 

You open the booking app to check the flight’s whereabouts - but it has landed in time. Where the hell is Jimin? 

He is fine, right? 

You can call his manager, but the man has a family and he was away from his wife and two year old kid for two weeks as well. So no… you don’t want to bother him unless it’s absolutely necessary. 

Opening the call logs, you dial your boyfriend. If he doesn’t pick up, you will go and contact his manager, but not before that. 

The call connects through kakotalk - it starts ringing, it rings, rings, rings and then disconnects. Your fears start swelling even more and more. 

As the call cuts, you stare at the screen blankly. No no no - you can not let yourself go down the rabbit hole even before knowing what’s up. 

Taking a deep breath, you call him for a second time. 

The call connects, it starts ringing and it is received after two rings. 

“Jimin! Are you okay? Where are you?” you almost scream into the speaker. 

But there’s no reply. All you hear is a small sigh. 

“I am fine, baby.” Jimin’s voice filters through the speaker, “no need to panic.” 

“Oh god! I- I was so scared! Where are you?” you ask the question again, a cold wave of relief spreading through your heart. 

“I am sorry. I… I-uh- I couldn’t catch the flight tonight. I was late to the airport. Manager hyung flew back home last night. And you know how tardy I can be when I am on my own. So… I will catch the earliest flight home, I promise.” he sounds apologetic. 

But it only makes you smile. “It’s okay, Jimin. Just be safe okay? Are you still at the airport?”  

“Ah- yes. Yes. I am in the bathroom. I should go look for the flights.” he replies. 

“Yeah. stay safe and text me when your flight takes off.” 

“Okay, Y/N. See you soon, baby.” 

“See you, Jiminie.” 

It’s a game of trying - winning or losing again and again. 

You try your best to convince yourself that there’s nothing to feel lonely about, that Jimin will be here in twenty four hours. But as you pack the food up and place it inside the fridge, you can’t help feeling a bit gutted. 

You know it’s temporary, you know it will go away.  

But still… feeling shit right now is very real and you can not just suppress this. Your spirits stay low as you wash the dishes and take a shower. Your mind stays occupied even when you do your nightly routine before bed. Jimin’s words play in your head as you force yourself to close your eyes to close and go back to sleep. 

You know what happened was just an accident and can happen to anyone. But there's one silly question that keeps rounding in your head - was Jimin not excited enough to see you? If he really wanted to come back home, wouldn't he stay alert about the flight and its timing? Especially the way they send alerts through mails and text messages? And why didn’t he tell you that he missed the flight earlier? He could have just texted you?

Shaking your head, you scold yourself. There's absolutely no reason to think so negatively. There's no way Jimin would- 

The train of your thoughts comes to a screeching halt as your phone starts vibrating on the nightstand. The very first thought that comes to your mind is Jimin, it has to be him who is calling. 

Grabbing the phone as soon as possible you find a completely different and unexpected name on the screen. Why is Ryohyun calling you so late? 

Swiping up on the answer, you voice a little greeting, not being sure enough if the call was intentional or just a mistake. 

“Hey?” your friend greets you, voice kind of concerned, “is everything okay?” 

“Ryohyun”, frowning a little you continue, “I should be the one asking you this. Is everything okay? Why are you calling so late?” 

“I am fine. I called you because I just saw Jimin at Hangkuk hospital. He seemed quite exhausted. I tried calling him but he didn’t hear me. And now he isn’t picking up my calls. I got so worried thinking something must have happened to you or one of your family members.” your friend explains. 

You hear it all. You listen to every word he says with utmost attention but still nothing makes sense. What is Jimin doing in the hospital? He should be in Paris right now? It has to be a mistake. Ryuhyun probably saw someone else. 

“I am fine, hyun-ah. And so is everyone else. You must have seen someone else. Jimin is not here in Korea. He should have landed today but he missed the flight.” you try to convince your friend and maybe yourself too. 

“Y/N, seriously?” you friend chuckles, “you really think I will mistake someone else for Jimin? Especially when his face is all over Oliveyoung?” there is a bit of pause before he continues, “it was Jimin, Y/N. I am sure. Okay, I gotta go now. Good night. Take care.” 

The call cuts, setting your doubts to sore higher than the sky. 

Ryuhyun is right. He can hardly make mistakes when it comes to recognizing Jimin. They have been friends for more than a decade now and also, he was the reason you met your boyfriend. So no… you can’t take it lightly. 

Something must have happened to him and he is lying to you! You can not just sit and wait for him to come back. You need to dial the one person who has to know everything. His manager. 

Despite feeling bad for calling so late, you ring him up. He picks your call up on the third ring. 

“Y/N-ssi? Uh- hello?” his voice tells of his confusion. But you don’t have time to explain anything. 

“Sorry for calling so late, Mr. Kim. I just wanted to ask about Jimin’s whereabouts? I heard he is at Hangkuk hospital? Is he okay? Has something happened to him?” tears start gathering in your eyes as you manage to utter those words somehow. 

“Oh? He hasn’t… he hasn’t informed you yet?” his manager’s voice turns a notch lower, as if he is scared to tell you something. 

“No. I don’t know anything. Please tell me if he is okay? Please?” a tear rolls down your cheek. 

“He is fine, Y/N-ssi. He is fine. It’s actually… the thing is that." The hesitation is as clear as daylight but you still don’t understand the source or reason for it, “Nabi-ssi was hospitalized earlier and Jimin is her emergency contact. So he had to be there for her at that moment. I am sure he will return home as soon as his need there is over.” 

The name makes its way through your ear and strikes your heart with the force of a thunder. Han Nabi - Jimin’s super model ex-girlfriend, the very person you are extremely insecure about, has been the reason behind Jimin’s lie. 

He gave you an entire false scenario behind his absence? He didn’t even think twice what would happen to you when you get to know the truth? He didn’t even consider your emotions, your sanity, your love - the relationship that can be endangered with just one such lie, and ran straight to her. What hurts the most is that he did it all while knowing how you feel about his ex-girlfriend and her constant attempt to keep being in his life despite breaking up two years ago.

You feel lost in the desert all of a sudden. The day started with so many expectations, so many plans for tonight and now it’s just something else - something as bad as a nightmare. You don’t know where to head, how to navigate and you would rather stay stagnant here in this feeling, this betrayal than doing something else - something like going after Jimin and demanding the truth. 

If he really loves you, he should come and tell you everything. 

If he really loves you, he would right whatever wrongs he made earlier. 

For this one time, you won’t chase, you won’t compromise your stance. You will wait for him to do so. And if he doesn’t, you guess, that will speak volume about what you actually mean to your boyfriend. 

Jimin is accustomed to being lied to. 

Being in the modelling industry means he has been lied to more times than he would care to admit. And we are not talking about small white lies here - here lies mean big life altering false statements that are capable of ruining someone’s entire day, or week or month for that matter. 

Although, Jimin is used to being lied to - he has never been the one to lie so nonchalantly. This was the very first time he did something so severe and his conscience is eating him out alive. 

On the top of everything - he lied to you! To you! Someone as pure and kind as you! But his only agenda behind crafting this lie was to stop you from spiraling down the rabbit hole, because he knows what kind of thoughts run around your head whenever Nabi is mentioned in a room. 

He is aware of your insecurity and despite trying to ease your fears, he has never once succeeded. Standing there, if he told you that he was saved as Nabi’s emergency contact and had to run to the hospital straight from the airport, which he chose to do instead of going back home to you, then… there are chances he might lose you. 

But he had no other option. The EMT called him thrice from Nabi’s number. Her manager being out of town only made things worse. He had to run here, not by his choice but for his duty as a fellow human being. 

“Are you Han Nabi’s guardian?” a nurse appears in the line of his sight, trying to grab his attention. 

Jimin stands up and bows a little, “ah- yes.” 

“The patient is now stable. She was having acute stress cramps. We have given her the medicines to ease her pain. You can take her home once she is done with her IV drop.” she bows and leaves once she is done with her explanation. 

Jimin doesn’t waste a second more. He runs towards the bed with a whole dialogue playing in his head. 

“Jimin-ah.” she whines as soon as Jimin appears from behind the curtains. “I am so sorry-” 

“Yes, you should be sorry, Nabi.” he states firmly without giving her any time to form another sentence. “It has been two years since we broke up. Why do you still have me as your emergency contact? You should have added your family or manager or whoever you wanted! Why me?” 

“Because I wanted you, it’s simple.” She dares to look sad. 

“No it’s not simple, Nabi. I have a girlfriend and you keep on trying to create problems between us. As if commenting on my posts and publicly flirting with me isn’t enough for you anymore, huh?” Jimin has had enough of her games, not anymore. Today tasted his limits. He is now standing at a point where telling you the truth will endanger the relationship and he is already shit scared about that. 

“You know why I do this. You know I love you.” Nabi states, giving him puppy eyes and all. 

“No you don’t. And you know that too.” Jimin places the pouch of medicine that he bought earlier down and takes his leave. 

He knows his narrative won’t match with his actions if he suddenly arrives home now. It’s already way past midnight and according to his own lie, he should only reach home the next evening. 

But he can’t keep lying to you anymore. He will go back now and tell you everything. You are always the one to invest much more emotional effort in this relationship, and if he can’t at least be truthful now, he will never be able to forgive himself. 

It’s almost thirty past one in the morning when you hear the door lock chiming. No one else knows the code other than you and your boyfriend, so it has to be him. 

It takes you by surprise. Jimin should not come home so early if he doesn’t want you to question his lie. 

If he actually missed his flight and had to catch another one - he would not be reaching home before 8 the next day. So, what is he trying to play here? 

The door cracks open, prompting you to turn on your heels and watch your boyfriend tiptoe inside the apartment. You watch as Jimin tries to drag his carrier without making any noise, as he bends down and undoes the shoe laces. You watch him as he sighs, grabs the carrier and tries to lift the entire thing into the living area. 

“Jimin…” you call him and only then he realizes you are sitting on the couch motionlessly. 

“Y/N?” he asks, putting the carrier down and reaching for the light control. 

As he flicks the switches up, his eyes meet yours. 

Jimin expected you to be asleep. He thought he would wake up earlier than you, make two cups of coffee, extra cream for you just the way you like and unleash whatever he had done. He would apologize, ask for forgiveness, do whatever you ask him to. That was his plan. 

So, you catching him red-handed as he sneaks in, tilts his calculations sideways. “Y/N, you- you are awake?” he fumbles with his words. 

Fuck! He is nervous. His fingers are trembling already and his gut is warning him of an impending doom. 

“Why? Would it be easier to lie your way around if I was asleep?” your voice comes out cold. Jimin gulps. 

“That- actually I- I mean-” Jimin was sure as hell, even a few minutes ago, that he would be able to tell you the truth without having to feel numb and nauseous with the fear of losing you. But as you are standing before him, face straight and stoic, voice colder than he has ever heard you, he doesn’t know where to find his will to keep going. 

“Let me tell you what you mean, Jimin.” you take a step forward. The tornado that’s raging inside you, takes the charge of your actions. And despite thinking you would let Jimin come clean, you can not stop your mouth from running anymore. 

Suddenly, the feeling of being wronged and betrayed is too much to bear. You want him to know that you are aware of his conscious choices and you no longer wish to stay understanding about them. 

“You mean that your super model ex-girlfriend is way more important than me. So you had to run to her while I waited for you with plates of home-cooked food that I prepared for you.” the tears that you have been fighting for the better part of the evening and night, finally start raining down your eyes. 

Jimin stiffens. You know? You knew about his whereabouts? How? No! That’s not his concern now. 

“Y/N, please listen to me.” he tries to calm you down by taking a few hurried steps towards you. There are tears in your eyes and Jimin doesn’t like to see you crying, especially now, because the reason is him. 

“Yes, Jimin. Go ahead. I want to know why…” you fail to finish the sentence. No matter how big of a bravado you pull, you are scared of his answer.  

Nabi is way above your competition. She is beautiful, confident, famous - a perfect companion to Jimin. They were the IT couple for the entirety of the time they dated. You watched it all - with your own eyes, while pining for Jimin endlessly. 

Although you two started dating a little more than a year ago, you and Jimin have been friends for a long time before. And you have been in love with him for half of the shared time. Never being able to gather enough courage to confess to him - you only watched him dating people one after another. None of that seemed to be too serious, but then Nabi came along. 

They dated for two years - longest in Jimin’s history and you watched whatever hope you had left off dying every single day little by little. Not to go into the details but in your eyes, Nabi was the only partner Jimin appeared to be very whipped for. 

However, things didn’t turn around as you, or Jimin for that matter, expected. They broke up shortly after their two year anniversary. 

Almost a year later, ten months to be precise, you confessed to him without expecting anything in return. What you wanted was to get the burden off your chest to finally move on and start going to the various blind dates your friends were setting you up on. 

By some twisted miracle, Jimin did not only accept your confession but he himself confessed to have a thing for you as well. He never thought you would be interested in his flashy life, and hence, stayed reluctant. 

Now back to the present, you think that you might have been a subject to his interest but was never capable of taking away the place Nabi held, or holds still till now. 

“She was rushed to hospital and I was saved as her emergency contact-” 

“I know all that, Jimin. I have heard all that.” you cut him off. Whatever explanation he was preparing in his mind, dims right away, “I want to know why did you lie to me? What was the reason behind hiding it all from me? If you told me the truth I wouldn’t have stopped you! I wouldn’t have pressured you to come back to me, especially when it's something as serious as a medical emergency. Did you lie to me so that I… I don’t come between you two? So that I stay in the dark while you keep putting her as the top most priority in your life? Is that so?” your mouth runs without a halt. Whatever you kept suppressed up until now comes rushing out of your whole being. Your body jerks as you let your emotions take over. 

“Y/N!” Jimin’s heart squeezes painfully inside his chest, “don’t… just don’t say stuff like that!” It's a painful realization. You really think he prioritizes Nabi over you? “I know I lied to you. I lied to you because I didn’t…” his voice trembles, “I don’t want to lose you. And I was afraid that if I told you the truth at that moment, you would… you would walk out of my life. I was afraid that I would come back home to find you… find you gone.” 

His words settle on the base of your heart like the center of a quake. You feel your resolve shaking. But no.. you can’t back down so easily. If you are staying with him, you will have to make sure Jimin never chooses her over you ever again. 

“And you think I can’t do that now? I still can walk out, Jimin. I would rather walk out than be a third-wheel between you and your ex." Wiping the tears with the back of your hand, you continue, “I know I am not as pretty or stylish or confident as her. I know well that I am not as suitable as she was for you. And that’s okay. You don’t have to be with me if you don’t want to. If you want to go back to her then go ahead, I am not gonna stop you. But be honest with me. Be honest and tell me to fuck off on my face. I promise, Jimin, you will never see me again!” 

Jimin’s face falls. His heart lurches inside his chest, before something akin to anger starts bubbling. 

He takes another step towards you and towers over your smaller form, “you want me to be honest? You want me to be honest? Okay then-” grabbing you by your bicep, he pulls you close to him. You crash against his chest with a yelp. 

“I fucking love you so much that I afraid you will leave me if you got to know I had to rush to the hospital! I fucking love you so much that I lied to you, which was a stupid move, because I could have just told you the truth. I love you so much that I yelled at Nabi and blocked her as soon as I was out of the hospital. I love you so much that I….” a tear tickles down his eye, “that I- I will go away if you don’t want to accept me anymore.” There's a lump in his throat and he hates it. He hates that he has to get these words out. He hates he has been making you feel he doesn’t value you enough for all these times when he could have shown how much you actually mean to him. 

For a stretch of a moment both of you stand still, voiceless, staring at each other as if your eyes would do the talking from now on. 

The thing is that you are aware of Jimin’s sincerity. If Park Jimin is one thing then he is sincere about the relationships he holds close to his heart. Yes, he is one of those people who are bad at giving. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t love. He loves, that too, very deeply, and that is why you are here, still with him, despite all the differences that create chaos between you two. 

“You love me?” The question is stupid and repetitive, but you can’t stop yourself from asking.

“Yes. Yes, I love you. I am in love with you from every single bone of my body.” Jimin replies, wiping his tears. He hates to be a crybaby, but the fear of losing you gripped his heart too much not to let his emotions spill over his eyes. 

“Then please… please don’t do something like this ever again, or I will… you will never find me again.” 

Leaving your biceps, he warps his hands around yours and squeezes gently, “I promise, I won’t. I promise. Please forgive me. Please?” 

You nod, “okay. Okay, but just this once.” 

“You won’t have to forgive me twice.” Jimin pulls you closer again. This time he wraps you in his embrace, relishing the warmth of your body, your scent, the comfort of your presence like a hungry beast. 

You melt in his embrace. Jimin is here. He really is here. Maybe he has chosen to do the wrong thing once but he is here, he is regretting and asking for forgiveness. The effort is visible and you would never stay blind to that. 

You are so lost in the hug that you don’t notice when Jimin has started swiping your hair off of your neck and started pressing kisses on the exposed skin. You jump a little when his cold fingers come in contact with your skin, right under your pj shirt.  

“Jimin-” the whine gets cut off as he shuts you with his lips. The kiss starts soft but turns hungry soon enough. Jimin can not take it anymore. 

He had been craving you so bad for all these times and just when he was about to get you under him, the mishap happened. But now that everything is over, he can have you. He can have you all to himself. 

He bites on your lower lip, earning a moan. 

“You should eat something, you haven’t-” 

“No worries, I am gonna eat for sure.” Jimin adds suggestively as he lifts you up and turns towards the bedroom. 

The night has been so eventful for you. At first you thought of spending it by watching a movie with your lovely boyfriend. Then you thought you would be staying up crying. Then when Jimin came back, you expected yourself to be all angry and pissed and maybe nurse a heartbreak. But look at you now, you are right where you wanted to be, writhing under Jimin as he makes love to you. 

Life is unpredictable for sure. It is full of twists and turns. But as long as a day ends well, everything is fine. 

For Jimin, as long as he can come back home to you… everything is fine. 

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[mikrokookiex]

Kook and jimins separate list angst romance recs?

the list is attached here, there are two for jk as anonie requested before. happy reading love :)

Park Jimin Angst

Jeon Jungkook Angst I / II