Hi! I’m Lo!
📚 writer of soft chaos & slow-burn dreams
🐾 dog cuddler | book hoarder | tea always half-full
🌿 90s baby | Namjoon biased, OT7 always
✨ fanfic is my love language. welcome to my cozy corner
He sat alone at the bar nursing the whiskey neat that the bartender poured for him an hour ago. The single ball of ice had since melted and the condensation now slid down the glass like tears. If this was the 1950’s he’d light up a cigarette and fill his lungs with the poison hoping to ease the pain of her not showing up… again.
“Sir, we are closing soon.”
Taehyung glanced up at the bartender, eyes glossed with pain.
“Just 5 more minutes, maybe she’ll show. Please” he begged.
“Of course.” He could tell the bartender took pity on him.
She wasn’t going to show, she never showed. Letter after letter, phone call after phone call, night after night. He waited. Still she never showed.
Was it truly over? Had she finally moved on from him?
Taehyung had gotten so lost in his work he couldn’t even remember where the trouble in their relationship began and what caused it to finally end. He felt betrayed, like they could’ve talked it out, went to therapy didn’t matter which kind. Regular, couples, hell he’d do electro convulsive therapy if it meant she would come back.
“Sir-“
“Yeah, I know.” He said putting a hundred dollar bill on the table. “Keep the change Miss.”
Taehyung turned up the collar on his coat then decided against it as it was late and probably better not to look like a villain from Gotham walking down the middle of Eighth street. The thud of the door behind him snapped him from his thoughts as the cold embraced him and his broken heart.
He stood there for a long moment, the rain slowly dampening the shoulders of his coat. The city had quieted for the night, leaving only the occasional passing car and the hum of a flickering neon sign across the street.
Taehyung slipped his hands into his pockets and started walking without any destination in mind. Home wasn’t an option. Every corner of that apartment still belonged to her.
Her slippers still sat beside the front door. The lavender candle she insisted smelled like spring remained untouched on the coffee table, and her favorite coffee mug with the chipped handle still occupied its usual place in the cabinet because she had once smiled and said, “Imperfections make things special.”
The memory made him let out a hollow laugh. If that were true, then why hadn’t his imperfections been enough for her to stay?
His phone buzzed in his pocket, and his heart leapt into his throat. For one foolish, desperate second, he thought it might be her. He pulled it out so quickly he nearly dropped it. The bright screen illuminated his face, and the name staring back at him made his chest sink.
Jimin.
The phone rang twice more before he finally answered.
“What?” he said, exhaustion heavy in his voice.
There was a brief pause on the other end before Jimin spoke. “You sound drunk.”
“I’m not.”
“You sound miserable.”
Taehyung let out a shaky breath, watching it disappear into the cold night air. “That’s because I am.”
Another silence settled between them.
“You’re waiting for her again, aren’t you?”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. Jimin knew him too well.
A sigh crackled through the speaker. “Tae… you can’t keep doing this to yourself.”
His jaw tightened. “Don’t.”
“She left six months ago.”
The words struck him like a physical blow.
Six months.
One hundred and eighty-three days.
He had counted every single one.
“You don’t know that,” he replied quietly.
“I know she hasn’t answered your calls.”
“Maybe she changed her number.”
“Taehyung…”
“Maybe she lost her phone. Maybe she’s sick. Maybe she’s—”
“She sent the divorce papers.”
The world seemed to stop around him.
Rain continued to fall, cold drops running down his face, but he barely felt them. Cars passed in the distance, their headlights blurring into streaks of light. All he could hear were those five words.
She sent the divorce papers.
She hadn’t forgotten him. She hadn’t been unable to reach him. She hadn’t been waiting for the right moment to come back. She had simply chosen not to.
His throat tightened painfully.
“I haven’t signed them,” he finally whispered.
The confession sounded pathetic even to his own ears, like a child refusing to accept the ending of a story.
“I know,” Jimin replied softly.
Taehyung closed his eyes.
“If I sign them… then it’s real.”
The words broke apart as they left him.
“If I sign them, then she’s really gone.”
Silence answered him for several long seconds.
Then Jimin spoke again, his voice gentler than before.
“I think she’s been gone for a long time, Tae.”
The tears came then.
Not the violent kind that stole your breath, but the quiet, exhausted kind that slipped free when there was nothing left to hold them back. They mixed with the rain as he stood alone in the middle of Eighth Street, grieving something that had already died long before tonight.
Because the truth was, he wasn’t waiting for her anymore.
He was waiting for the version of himself that existed when she still loved him—the man who smiled easily, who believed in forever, who never questioned whether he was enough.
And standing there beneath the cold rain, Taehyung finally realized that man wasn’t coming back either.
___
The weeks following the divorce passed in a haze so thick Taehyung could barely remember them. He went through the motions because his body knew what to do even when his mind didn’t. He woke up, showered, dressed, went to work, smiled when necessary, and returned home to an apartment that no longer felt like home. To everyone around him, he appeared to be coping. Grieving, perhaps, but coping nonetheless.
They couldn’t have been more wrong.
The first thing to disappear was sleep.
At night, he would lie awake on his side of the bed, staring at the empty space beside him until the sun began peeking through the curtains. Some nights he swore he could still smell her shampoo lingering on the pillow she had left behind. Other nights he would wake in a panic, reaching across the mattress only to be greeted by cold sheets and crushing silence. Eventually, he stopped trying to sleep altogether.
Then came the drinking.
It started innocently enough—a glass of whiskey before bed to quiet his thoughts. One glass became two. Two became half a bottle. Before long, there wasn’t a single room in the apartment that didn’t contain an empty bottle tucked somewhere out of sight. The warmth of alcohol dulled the ache, if only for a few hours, and those few hours became the only peace he knew.
Then the apartment itself began to deteriorate alongside him.
Laundry piled in corners. Dirty dishes crowded the sink. Dust settled on every surface. The once meticulously organized home she had spent years making beautiful slowly transformed into something unrecognizable. Taehyung no longer cared. He moved through the rooms like a ghost haunting his own life.
He had tried removing traces of her at first. The photographs came down. The framed vacation pictures were shoved into closets. Her favorite records were boxed away. Yet somehow she remained.
She was in the lavender candle sitting untouched on the coffee table.
In the sweater she had forgotten to take.
In the dent on the couch cushion where she always curled up to read.
In the silence.
God, the silence.
It was everywhere.
Friends noticed the change almost immediately. Jimin called constantly during the first month, then every few days, then once a week. Taehyung ignored every call. Jungkook showed up unannounced several times only to be turned away at the door. Eventually, even they stopped trying.
Isolation suited him or so he told himself.
The truth was far uglier.
Because when there was no one left to distract him, all Taehyung had were memories. He replayed every conversation, every argument, every missed opportunity with obsessive precision. He searched desperately for the exact moment everything had gone wrong, convinced that if he could just find it, somehow he could undo it.
But memories are cruel things. They change shape depending on who’s looking at them.
What had once been arguments became betrayals.
What had once been misunderstandings became deliberate acts of cruelty.
The woman he had loved so fiercely slowly transformed in his mind into someone else entirely.
Someone who had abandoned him.
Someone who had chosen to watch him drown.
Someone who had never loved him as deeply as he had loved her.
And resentment, once planted, grows quickly in lonely places.
One sleepless night, nearly four months after the divorce had been finalized, Taehyung found himself staring at her social media profile.
He told himself it was harmless.
He only wanted to know if she was okay.
That lie lasted less than a week.
Soon he knew where she lived. He knew she had moved into a small apartment on the west side of the city. He knew she still bought coffee every Thursday morning from the café on Pine Street and that she preferred to sit by the window with a book in hand. He knew she had cut her hair shorter. He knew she had started smiling again.
The photographs devastated him.
Because while he had been surviving, she had been living.
And she looked happy.
Truly happy.
The realization hollowed him out.
He spent an entire evening sitting in the dark, whiskey bottle dangling loosely from his fingertips, staring at a picture of her laughing with friends. He couldn’t stop looking at it. Couldn’t stop zooming in. Couldn’t stop wondering who had taken the photo and what had made her smile like that.
By dawn, the sadness had become something else.
Something colder. Something dangerous. Because grief eventually reaches a crossroads. You either learn to let go or you decide someone must pay for your suffering.
And as Taehyung stood across the street from her apartment building for the first time, hidden beneath the shadows of a nearby awning while rain drizzled softly around him, he realized with terrifying clarity that he no longer wanted closure.
He wanted answers.
And if she wouldn’t willingly give them to him, he would take them himself.
___
Detectives Namjoon and Seokjin Kim paused just inside the doorway, neither man speaking as the full weight of the scene settled over them.
Rain lashed against the apartment windows, each flash of lightning illuminating the apartment in stark, ghostly bursts. The city skyline stretched beyond the glass like a sea of fractured diamonds, indifferent to the tragedy that had unfolded high above it.
The apartment itself looked as though a storm had torn through it.
Furniture lay overturned. Blood & brains covered the surfaces from top to bottom. Picture frames littered the hardwood floors, their shattered glass crunching beneath the boots of crime scene technicians. Family photographs had been ripped from albums and scattered throughout the living room. Several had been arranged deliberately around the bodies, as if someone had wanted the memories present for what came next.
“This wasn’t random,” Namjoon said quietly, surveying the destruction. “Whoever did this wanted them to remember.”
At the center of the room lay three bodies.
The woman and her boyfriend (A man identified as Yoongi Min) rested side by side on the floor, their fingers intertwined. Whether they had reached for one another in their final moments or had been positioned that way afterward, no one could say. Between them lay Taehyung.
He was on his back, one arm stretched toward the woman as though even in death he had been unable to stop reaching for her. His expression was eerily peaceful, a stark contrast to the devastation surrounding him.
For a long moment, neither detective spoke.
“Fuck,” Seokjin finally muttered.
A uniformed officer approached, holding a notepad. “We have a witness statement.”
Namjoon raised an eyebrow. “Neighbor?”
The officer nodded.
“Mrs. Choi in 14B. She said she’d been hearing arguing for hours. Thought about calling building security but decided against it.” The officer grimaced. “She admitted she’d been listening through the wall.”
“What did she hear?” Seokjin asked.
The officer glanced down at his notes.
“Mostly one-sided. Male voice asking the same questions over and over.”
“What questions?”
“‘Why wasn’t I enough?’ ‘Did you ever love me?’ ‘Was he worth throwing us away?’”
The officer swallowed.
“Mrs. Choi said she heard the woman crying. Then she heard another male voice arrive sometime after midnight. She says there was shouting near the front door followed by silence.”
“And after that?” Namjoon asked.
“Nothing for almost an hour.” The officer hesitated. “Then she heard music.”
“Music?”
“What did she hear?” Seokjin asked.
The officer nodded. “Mrs. Choi couldn’t remember the exact song title. She said it was something about a honeybee. She remembers because it kept playing over and over again. Same song. Same lyrics. For nearly an hour.”
Lightning cracked outside, momentarily bathing the room in stark white light.
Seokjin’s gaze drifted toward the stereo system sitting in the corner.
“A love song?” he murmured.
“No,” Namjoon corrected softly, his eyes settling on the three bodies lying together on the floor. “A eulogy.”
Near the record player sat a single handwritten letter addressed simply:
To the only woman I ever loved.
Beneath it rested three empty whiskey glasses.
Whatever answers Taehyung had come looking for, it was painfully clear he had never found them.
Namjoon crossed the room slowly, careful not to disturb the evidence markers scattered across the hardwood floor. His eyes settled on the sound system in the corner, its display still illuminated despite the chaos surrounding it.
“Crime scene techs said the music was still playing when they arrived,” he murmured.
Seokjin nodded. “The neighbor said it was on repeat.”
With a gloved hand, Namjoon pressed play.
Soft guitar drifted through the penthouse, followed by Olivia Rodrigo’s voice singing about love, longing, and the desperate hope of never having to watch someone you love become a stranger.
The song filled the apartment, weaving itself between overturned furniture and shattered glass. It transformed the scene from a crime scene into something far more tragic. A mausoleum dedicated to a relationship that had died long before the people inside it had.
Seokjin swallowed hard.
“He made them listen to this?” he asked quietly.
Namjoon’s gaze remained fixed on the three bodies lying together in the center of the room.
“No,” he said after a long pause. “I think he was listening to it for himself.”
The song continued to play, its melancholy melody echoing through the horror-drenched penthouse like a final goodbye.
___
The song had long since ended.
Only the soft patter of rain against the windows remained.
For the first time that night, the penthouse was silent.
Crime scene technicians moved through the apartment with quiet efficiency, photographing evidence, collecting personal effects, and carefully cataloging the remnants of three shattered lives. The once beautiful home now looked hollow, stripped of everything except grief.
The coroner’s team arrived shortly after three in the morning.
One by one, the bodies were prepared for transport.
First, the boyfriend.
Then her.
Seokjin watched as the Lead Coroner Hoseok Jung gently separate their intertwined hands, a small gesture that somehow felt more tragic than anything else he’d witnessed that night. He looked away, suddenly finding the skyline far easier to stomach than the scene unfolding behind him.
Taehyung was the last to leave.
As the attendants wheeled him past, his arm shifted beneath the white sheet, briefly exposing the faded gold band still clutched tightly in his hand. No one tried to remove it.
Some things, Seokjin supposed, belonged to the dead.
The elevator doors slid shut with a soft chime.
And just like that, they were gone.
Three people.
Three lives.
Reduced to evidence numbers and case files.
Seokjin exhaled slowly. “I’ve been doing this job for ten years,” he said quietly, staring at the empty space where the bodies had lain. “You’d think it would get easier.”
Namjoon stood beside the window, hands tucked into the pockets of his overcoat. The city below was beginning to wake. Headlights cut through the darkness. People would soon rise for work, make coffee, kiss their loved ones goodbye, completely unaware of the tragedy that had unfolded above them.
“No,” Namjoon said softly. “It shouldn’t.”
Seokjin glanced at him. “What do you mean?”
Namjoon’s eyes remained fixed on the city.
“People always talk about heartbreak like it’s romantic. Like loving someone so much it destroys you is somehow beautiful.” He paused, his reflection staring back at him in the glass. “But there’s nothing beautiful about this.”
He turned, surveying the ruined apartment one final time.
“Love isn’t possession. It isn’t obsession. And it certainly isn’t something you can force another person to give you.”
Thunder rumbled in the distance.
Namjoon adjusted his coat and headed for the door.
“The saddest part,” he said quietly, “is that somewhere along the way, three people stopped seeing each other as people and started seeing each other as answers.”
He reached for the handle.
“And answers,” he murmured, “have a way of disappointing us.”
The door clicked shut behind them.
“And I hope I never see what your face looks like going. A face I swear that I could spend my whole life knowing. Here's to hoping…”
: OBSESSION : At what point does love stop being beautiful and become something sick?
[⋆❀⋆] Love left forgotten and unfelt will rot. It will mold and fester, turning rancid and toxic until there’s no hint left that it used to be something beautiful. Once it’s toxic, it starts to spread. It creeps along, black fingers sulking forward and sidling up into the darkest recesses of the mind. Then it feeds there, grows there, and if it’s not caught in time, it takes over. It becomes an obsession...
Jhope x reader, ANGST, toxic relationship, loathing... my god is it lots of loathing, revenge, gaslighting, smut, more heavy angst. Did I mention toxic?
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: HEAD ABOVE WATER : can a cold hearted business woman and a soft hearted surgeon tackle the past and make a future together?
[⋆❀⋆] Every night Celine dreamt of drowning. Dragon Lady by day and avocado addict always, she barely has time for dating—let alone love. Enter Namjoon: a golden-retriever-vibes pediatric surgeon at the local Children’s Hospital, with too much heart and not enough hours.
Can two people with messy pasts and hectic lives stumble into a forever?
|one|two|two.5|three|four|five| - COMPLETED
Namjoon x doctor au, random encounter, romance, strangers to lovers, smut, whirlwind romance, romantic comedy.
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: THE ART OF DECEPTION : Hoseok, a master art forgery scientist, crosses paths with Evelyn—a woman of dangerous secrets and electrifying charm.
[⋆❀⋆] Hoseok takes down art forgers before his morning coffee. Evelyn hoards secrets like treasures. When they crash together, it’s flirtation, danger, and sparks hot enough to burn past the bedroom—if they can outrun what’s coming.
LIGHT AND SHADOW : part II of Hoseok & Evelyn’s adventure.
RENAISSANCE : part III the conclusion. - coming soon.
Hoseok x forensic scientist au, lovers to enemies, romance, mystery, angst, smut.
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: WHEN THE LIGHTS GO OUT : Seven people, seven stories, one city wide blackout. These stories can be read individually or in order. The choice is yours. ☺️
[⋆❀⋆] CURTAINS & CHAOS: He hasn’t noticed a thing, and she’s already dripping from head to toe.
Taehyung x florist au, random encounter, romance, strangers to lovers, smut.
[⋆❀⋆] HEAT ME UP, COOL ME DOWN : When you screw up, you get her flowers. And when that doesn’t work, eat pussy.
Yoongi x stoner au, random encounter, romance, strangers to lovers...friends?, smut.
[⋆❀⋆] KIND OF CUTE, KIND OF TRASH - He really is a nice guy.
Jimin x Regular guy au, childhood friends to lovers,
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— ONESHOTS
: FOREIGN : He'll do anything you want... As long as you ask.
Namjoon x Reader, soft yandere, smut, drabble.
: STREAMING : Thoughts of a heartbroken man...
Seokjin x Reader, angst, ex lovers , drabble.
: HOTWIRED : You just needed your car fixed.
Jungkook x Reader, smut, instant attraction , drabble.
: A EULOGY FOR THE LIVING : Another heartbroken man.
Taehyung x main character, heartbreak, love, murder, obsession, drabble
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♡ Coming Soon ♡
[⋆❀⋆] #BLESSED - Hoseok x main character
[⋆❀⋆] SAVE THE WORLD, GET THE GIRL - Jungkook x main character
[⋆❀⋆] LAKESIDE PARK - Namjoon x main character
[⋆❀⋆] LIPS OF AN ANGEL - Jin x main character
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More stories are on the way! I want to thank all of you for reading, liking and sharing my work!
•genre/tropes: best friends au, romance, slow burn, yearning, unresolved tension, childhood friends to lovers, unrequited love.
•rating: explicit
•word count: 11.8k
•status: ongoing || series.
•authors note: Howdy! * Welcome to the third part of a 7-part series featuring all the members. Each story stands on its own, so feel free to read in any order once they're all out.
You know that one girl?
Everyone knows a girl like her. It seems like she's unfair, like everything about her is just... perfect. All of the words that describe a pretty girl apply to her. She's cute and adorable and beautiful and sexy. Her nose scrunches when she laughs and her eyes go wide when she's shocked or scared. Her smile could end wars. Everyone knows that girl who is just unfairly beautiful.
On top of that, she's the kindest, sweetest, most genuine person you'll ever meet. She's hopeful and optimistic. Everyone wants to be around her because she makes them feel like the most important person in the world, even if thirty people are surrounding her. Even if you're in a line-up of people vying for her attention, you feel like you matter around her. And she's wholesome and perfect and anyone who hurts her is showing what a piece of trash they are because it's like kicking a puppy or murdering a baby unicorn.
You know that girl, right? That perfect girl? That beautiful and kind and amazing girl?
In my world, that girl was Sloane Chambers. She was the sweetest person anyone had ever met, she was my roommate, and that Thursday night, she was polishing off her third glass of red wine with tears streaming down her cheeks.
"What's wrong with me, Jimin?" she asked tearfully.
"Nothing's wrong with you," I said. "Evan was just..."
If anyone who hurt Sloane was a piece of trash, Evan Boyko was King of Trash Mountain. Evan Boyko was the entire fucking overflowing landfill and all of the garbage trucks full of garbage that was spilling out because the landfill was overflowing.
Evan Boyko was a motherfucking, stinking, flaming, burning trash pile, and I didn't just say that because I was in love with Sloane or something. He was a pile of trash because he was dating Sloane and fucking every woman he could get his dick into on the side.
"...he was trash," I finished. "Smelly, rotting garbage."
Sloane giggled thickly, sniffing as she wiped her face. "I really thought he was different."
I bit back my instinctive response, but she was too observant.
"What?" she asked, reaching for the bottle of wine.
"Nothing," I said.
"Please, Jimin? You want to say something. I can tell."
I looked across the table at Sloane, her eyes rimmed with red and her cheeks shiny with tears. Crumpled Kleenex dotted the table around her as she studied me back. It wasn't in my nature to hide things from Sloane—she was my best friend, after all—but what I wanted to say would be more hurtful than helpful.
She found out about Evan's extracurricular activities while she was working her shift at the animal shelter. Sloane loved animals and had volunteered there as a teenager, then went to one of the nearby community colleges to get her vet tech diploma. She came back to Haven Falls just before Alice McGrady retired, and Mrs. McGrady had demanded that they hire Sloane, going so far as to say she'd never retire if they didn't bring Sloane on as her replacement.
I heard through the grapevine that they were planning on hiring Sloane anyway, but Mrs. McGrady liked to feel important and involved, so no one told her it wasn't her doing that got Sloane the job.
Anyway, Sloane had been at work when a girl we'd gone to school with, Dawn Forrest, burst into the shelter, bawling her eyes out. Sloane, being Sloane, immediately thought she'd lost her pet or maybe had a sick animal or something and ran to her.
"No!" sobbed Dawn as Sloane wrapped an arm around her shoulders. "I'm here to apologize."
"Apologize for what?" Sloane asked, handing Dawn a Kleenex.
"I didn't know he was... I'm so sorry," she sniffled. "I swear, Sloane, I had no idea he was your boyfriend. I feel awful."
Sloane, still being Sloane, comforted Dawn as she told her all about how she'd ended up sleeping with Evan, not realizing he and Sloane had been dating for six months, and how they'd been hooking up for at least three months at that point. Sloane held her hand as Dawn sobbed that she'd thought Evan was cheating on her, and he was: not only with Sloane, but with Kayla Voychka, the nineteen-year-old redhead who lived in the townhouses on Park Road, and some girl named Patricia who lived in the next town over.
"And those are just the ones I could find," Dawn blubbered as Sloane held her hand. "You have to believe me. I feel so bad, Sloane, I can't believe I did this and to you, of all people!"
Dawn seemed shocked that any guy would treat Sloane like that, and Sloane seemed pretty surprised by the revelation that her trashbag boyfriend was acting like trash. It wasn't surprising, though. Not if you knew Sloane.
I'd known her since we were kids who lived next-door to each other. In a perfect world, we would have been best friends who were inseparable since birth or something, but that wasn't the case.
Sloane was a year younger than me, and I only lived next-door to her part of the time, since I spent the weekends with my dad. So, growing up, it wasn't like we ever played together or anything. It wasn't until we were in high school that we even spoke, and that was only because my mom was throwing all my stuff onto the lawn and screaming at me. I don't remember what that particular fight was about, but it was the first time she'd done it so publicly.
Clothes and books and other stupid things were flying out the door faster than I could collect them as my mom yelled. I remember Mrs. Roth, the Homeowners Association lady, watching from down the street, and I remember seeing Mrs. McGrady walk by and thinking that everyone in town would know I'd been kicked out by the end of the day. I remember the final slam of the door and the sudden silence in the middle of the afternoon as I stared at the house I'd grown up in, my face red as I held an armful of clothes in the front yard.
That's when Sloane came over.
"Are you okay?" she'd asked.
"Uh..." I said.
"That was a dumb question," she said, biting her lip. "Jimin, right?"
I nodded.
"Let's pick all this up and you can come over to my house while we figure things out."
Just like that, it was "we." I wasn't figuring things out on my own; Sloane was there to help me. Her parents seemed surprised when they came home from work to discover the two of us sitting in their kitchen, folding my clothes and trying to figure out if I could sneak back in the house to get the things my mom hadn't thrown out on the lawn, but they were as kind to me as Sloane was. When my dad refused to let me stay with him, Mrs. Chambers insisted I stay in their guest room, at least until I figured things out.
My mom relented and took me back in a few days later, but I moved out as soon as I turned eighteen. I ended up with a roommate, but Sloane came to visit almost every day until she graduated high school. It was devastating when she left town to get her vet tech diploma, but it ended up working out: my old roommate moved out two months before she came back, and when I asked if she wanted to be my new roommate, she jumped at the chance.
All that was to say that Sloane was a fixer. She saw the best in everyone and even when people weren't the best, she wanted to make them their best. She was inherently attracted to people who needed someone to believe in them, the problem being that a lot of the time, those people didn't want to be believed in.
"Tell me what you're thinking, Jimin," Sloane begged, bringing me out of my memory.
"It's not the right time," I replied.
She stared at me for a moment. "Don't tell me you're in love with me."
"No!" I exclaimed, certain my face had immediately turned maroon. Coughing, I lowered my voice. "I mean... no. Not that you aren't, you know..."
"Ouch," she said.
I cringed. "This came out wrong, can I try again?"
"I was just joking, you know," she said.
I laughed uncomfortably, shaking my head. "I was just thinking that I didn't think Evan was different than the others."
She frowned. "What do you mean?"
"Well... think about your other exes. What about Nero?"
She thought for a moment. "Well, he was like... I mean, I was kind of immature when I started dating him. He just seemed so mature and mysterious."
"He wore a leather jacket when it was hot as fuck outside and bummed money off you all the time to fill up that shitty motorcycle he had."
"Well, yeah. He didn't have a job," she admitted.
"And then there was Alex."
She bit her lip. "I broke up with him, though."
"After you caught him stealing from you."
She didn't say anything.
"Jonathan?" I said.
"He got help for his anger issues after we broke up," she said in a tiny voice.
"And Rey?"
"Well..."
"He was addicted to cocaine, Sloane."
She sighed. "And then Evan. I just seem to attract the worst people, don't I?"
I twisted my mouth. "I mean, to an extent, I guess."
"I'm starting to think that men are just garbage," she said bluntly.
"Well, we do suck."
"Not you!" she said quickly, her eyebrows creasing with worry. "That was mean. I was just... I'm exaggerating. I'm just bitter right now."
"Yeah, but..." I hesitated, then took a deep breath. "Okay. If men are garbage, maybe you're like a raccoon."
Sloane raised her eyebrows. "What?"
My face wasn't just red anymore. It felt like my skin was crawling, like I was allergic to the anxiety the conversation was giving me.
"Like, maybe... maybe it's not that you're attracting a certain type, it's that you're kind of attracted to a certain type."
"I like garbage, you mean," she said flatly.
"That's... that came out wrong, too."
She barely heard me. "You think I'm a tiny little trash panda digging through the dumpster trying to find the juiciest piece of rotten meat, and then I'm surprised when it makes me sick."
"Uh... well, sort of? Not..." I sighed, looking at her. "This is why I didn't want to say this right now."
"No, you... I asked you to," she said. "I just didn't realize that's what you thought of me."
"I don't think of you like that!" I protested. "I just meant—"
"You just called me a raccoon," she said sadly.
"Raccoons are cute, though," I said desperately. "Right?"
I wasn't just digging myself into a hole, I was creating a man-made stormwater pond using nothing but a shitty raccoon analogy and inappropriate timing. Sloane's lips flicked downwards as she nodded.
"Yeah, I guess," she said.
"Sloane, I didn't mean—"
"No, it's fine," she said, draining the rest of her glass. "I think I'm just gonna go to bed."
"It's eight-thirty."
"Well, I also have an early shift tomorrow."
"I'm sorry," I said, looking down.
She stood up and smiled half-heartedly. "I don't know if all men are garbage, but even if they are, that'll never apply to you. You're the nicest guy, Jimin. Really. I'll feel better tomorrow."
She hugged my shoulders as she walked by, a quick squeeze that told me she wasn't mad, but I hadn't done anything to make her feel better. She was far too polite to say it, though, and guilt scraped down my bones as I watched her go into her bedroom. I sighed, then stood up and cleared the wine bottle and glasses away, finished the half-glass I'd poured for myself so she didn't feel like she was drinking alone, and went into my room.
I hated being called a nice guy.
There was weight to being called a nice guy. "Nice guys" weren't really nice guys, they were guys who thought they were nice and got all mopey when the women they liked didn't like them back. "Women only like bad boys," they'd say. "Women don't like nice guys. Nice guys finish last. You go out of your way to respect women and they won't even date you."
Like respecting women was some step you were supposed to take to get laid rather than just being the right thing to do.
"Nice guys" befriended women with the expectation that they'd eventually get moved out of the so-called friend-zone. "Nice guys" didn't tell these women they liked about their feelings, then got angry and jealous and self-deprecating when said women dated other men.
You know, like exactly what I was doing to Sloane.
I flopped down on my bed and cringed, slamming my eyes shut. I'd never meant to develop feelings for her. I really hadn't. She was my best friend and had been for years, and even when she'd first moved in, I'd told myself those feelings I had were just friendly ones. I could think she was pretty, as a friend. I could want her to date guys who were better for her. Friends wanted the best for their friends. I could feel protective and angry when people hurt her because I cared about her, and there was nothing wrong with caring about a friend.
There was something wrong with nearly throwing up when she brought her boyfriends over to stay the night, though, and definitely something wrong with deciding that those were the nights I was going to party and crash at another friend's place.
I'd never made a move on her, and I didn't ever intend to. Even as I heard her crying through the wall and my body ached to go to her, to comfort her and hold her and press my face into her hair, I told myself it was just a small crush. It was natural, right? A guy and a girl living together, being around each other all the time... it was normal to feel like I might have feelings. Didn't mean they were real feelings.
There was no denying that she was incredibly attractive. I mean, she was an amazing person, and that's what mattered most. Physically, though, everyone could see that she had a smile that made me feel like I was melting, and that her eyes were expressive and bright, and that her body was... perfect. Just so, so perfect.
And when you live with someone, you notice those things. People get comfortable in their homes, and there was nothing wrong with that, but sometimes it meant Sloane would walk around in a T-shirt and short-shorts as pyjamas. And sometimes she wouldn't wear a bra, and I didn't mean to notice. It wasn't like I was trying to look, it was just... she was just there, and it was hard not to notice when she'd curl up beside me on the couch and snuggle against my arm. It wasn't my fault that her nipples would get hard and that the fabric of her shirt was thin enough to let me feel them as she cuddled against me. And I couldn't help that I liked that feeling, or that my body reacted to it. That was just biology. That was... it just happened.
I could help what I did about it after we went to our separate rooms, though, and that's where things got complicated, because I couldn't deny how hot she was, and I couldn't stop myself from thinking about her when I stroked my dick.
The guilt surged through me again, my face turning red as I thought about the last time she'd sat with me on the couch. I was being selfish. The right thing to do would've been to tell Sloane I was starting to have feelings for her so she could decide what she wanted to do, since she might act differently around me if she knew I thought of her like that. It just felt wrong, though. I couldn't tell her how I felt when she had a boyfriend, and every time she broke up with a boyfriend, it felt like it was too soon to put that kind of pressure on her.
Worst of all, if I admitted how I felt, I might lose my best friend. And I loved her too much as a friend to risk that.
Instead, I ignored the fact that I wanted to be with her, I tried to ignore the sound of her crying in her room, and I fell asleep hoping against hope that things would go back to normal the next day.
My hopes were dashed just after six-thirty the next morning. I woke up in a sweat, the air in my room stagnant and stale. Even though it was early, I could already tell it was going to be a hot day. I could hear Sloane getting ready in the bathroom, the sound of the tap almost frantic. The fact that I could hear anything at all meant only one thing: she was late for work.
Usually when she was late for work, I offered her a ride. That day, my shift was starting shortly after hers and I'd risk being late myself. I could get her there, but only if I got ready first. I pulled myself out of bed, yawning as I crossed to my door and opened it, clad in only my boxers but assuming she'd still be in the bathroom.
"Sloane, d'you need a ride?" I called in the direction of the closed door.
"Oh my God, Jimin, that would be amazing!" she cried.
Before she even finished speaking, she flung the door open unexpectedly. I jumped back into my room, stumbling.
"Oh!" she said, pausing after bursting out of the bathroom. Her eyes widened as she looked at me, her mouth dropping open before she started laughing.
"Uh, give me a sec!" I blurted, slamming my door.
"Sorry," came the quiet response, punctuated by a nervous giggle.
Just what every guy likes to hear when the woman he likes sees him half-naked. I felt my face burning as I dug through my pile of clothes for a clean work shirt and black pants.
The redness didn't fade before I left my bedroom, nor could I make eye contact as Sloane filled a travel mug with coffee and handed it to me. I muttered my thanks and grabbed my lunch from the fridge.
"Jimin, I—"
"Alrighty, I think we're set!" I said loudly. "Let's hit the road."
"Can I apologize?" she asked quietly.
"Can we just not talk about it?" I replied.
"Okay," she said sadly.
I felt guilty for making her sad, but couldn't bring myself to say anything else. We didn't talk at all as we got into my shitty old car and I drove her to her job at the animal shelter.
"I might have to work a little late so I'll be okay to walk home tonight," she said as she got out of the car. "See you later, Jimin."
"Bye," I said, but she'd already shut the door. I sighed before turning around and speeding across town to get to my glamorous job at the gas station.
The day passed by slowly. It was as hot as I'd imagined it would be, and that kind of heat only brings out the worst in people. Three different people bitched about the price of gas, like I had anything to do with it, and one accused me of driving up the price because we were the only gas station in town.
I mean, that was true, but it wasn't my gas station.
I spent my half-hour lunch at Ruby Love’s Cafe next door. Usually, I went for a walk around the block, but it was so hot that the back of my shirt was soaked just walking to the cafe. It was relatively busy given it was mid-day on a Friday, but I managed to get a table and play games on my phone until I had to go back to work.
The slowness of the day only made the time with my thoughts more painful.
I knew she hadn't meant to laugh at me, and I knew it had nothing to do with... well. Whatever. Sloane wasn't mean-spirited and her laugh had probably been due to nerves or surprise. I mean, the situation was a little funny. And it only hurt because I secretly liked Sloane, and it wasn't like she had any idea that I did.
On top of that, she was hardly ever late for work, and when she was, it was because she overslept. She likely overslept because she'd been crying all night, and she was crying all night because I'd called her a raccoon. Well, that probably wasn't the only reason. I mean, she had just broken up with her boyfriend. Me not talking to her as we drove to work also probably didn't help.
I decided after my shift ended that I'd pick up some ice cream as an apology. Her favorite flavor at Ruby Love’s was Mint Moose Tracks, a disgusting combination of mint ice cream with peanut butter cups and a fudge swirl. She had to have some flaws, after all, and her taste in ice cream was one of them. Still, when work was done, I walked next door and got in line, intending to get a pint of that abomination for her and a pint of Espresso Flake for myself.
Being just after three-thirty, Ruby Love’s was incredibly busy with families stopping by to cool off on the way home from school. I was waiting patiently, but when Victor Kim walked in, I grabbed my phone and pretended to be busy typing a message.
Victor was the definition of creepy. He had a scraggly mustache and thinning hair, but those alone weren't enough to make him creepy. What made him creepy was the beady eyes and the persistent rumour that he shot porn out of his house on Park Road. I didn't know how true it was, but Victor would only laugh his wispy little "heh-heh-heh" of a laugh when asked about it. I had made the mistake of being polite to him when I first started working at the gas station and he'd stop in to buy cigarettes, not knowing that would make him think we were friends.
No matter what I did, he thought we were friends. I had flat-out said to his face that we weren't friends and he thought I was joking. I used to avoid serving him whenever possible, but we'd hired two new women in the past three months and he was worse to them than he was to me.
Given my mood that day, I didn't want to deal with Victor. Victor being Victor, of course, forced me to.
"My daddy says that the good guys don't touch womens without their permission," came a loud child's voice. "He says that only the supervillains do something so gross. Are you a good guy, Mr. Kim?"
Eyes wide, I looked up to see Victor standing beside a lady I thought was on the school council or something. She was one of those Instagram moms, her kids sitting quietly at a nearby table holding their ice cream so she could take a picture of them. She wore a floppy straw hat and a bright red sundress, and her face was almost as red as the dress.
Victor caught my eye and chuckled sarcastically, jerking his thumb at the woman before glaring at one of the boys sitting at the table.
"Wow, great thanks I get for helping a lady out," he said.
The woman looked uncomfortably angry. "Yes, you get an eight-year-old telling you that you shouldn't touch people inappropriately even if you say you're helping them."
The fucking pig.
"Leave her alone, Victor," I said loudly.
Victor raised his eyebrows, his mouth half-open. I folded my arms across my chest.
"What was that, Jimin?" he said incredulously. "You got a problem, kid?"
"Oh, shut up," said a guy at a nearby table who was sitting with his daughter.
The small parlor was uneasily quiet and unusually tense. Victor looked from me to the man at the table to the woman in the red dress before snorting and throwing his hands up in disgust.
"You try to do a nice thing for someone..." he grumbled, marching towards the door.
People stopped staring as the woman smiled at me and the other guy before scurrying to the table with her children. I wanted to check on her, but she didn't look like she wanted any extra attention, so I stayed in line and ordered my two pints.
Once I had the ice cream, I hurried back to my car. Clouds were starting to roll in and I frowned, wondering if we were in for a storm. Checking my phone, I wondered if I should call Sloane to see if she wanted a ride home. She hated storms, possibly more than anything else in the world. They terrified her. She said she might be late, but her shift was technically supposed to be done at four, so if she was finishing on time...
I took a breath. If she wanted a ride home, she would have asked for one, and there were no new messages from her. I was turning into someone's overprotective mother, worrying over a few dark clouds in the sky. Besides, I had to get home quickly, or the ice cream would melt.
I was halfway down the road when I hit a garbage can.
Well, more accurately, when a garbage can nearly flew into my windshield.
It was empty, thankfully, although who knew what it was doing out three days past garbage day. I slammed on my brakes as it bounced off the hood of my car. The lid popped off, flying across the road towards The Enchanted Florist while the can itself rolled down the sidewalk.
The wind picked up suddenly and fiercely. Pulling forward slowly, I figured it was a bit more than a few dark clouds in the sky and that I should probably call Sloane.
I pulled into the parking lot next to the grocery store and dialled her number, waiting as it rang. When she answered, all I could hear was wind.
"Jimin?" I heard her yell faintly.
"Where are you?" I replied.
"What?"
"Where are you?" I asked louder.
"I can't hear you!" she said, almost sobbing. "It's so windy."
"Where. Are. You?" I said as loudly and slowly as I could.
It seemed to get through that time. "I'm on Drum Farm Lane!"
I said goodbye but I don't think she heard me. I nearly hit the garbage can again as I tore out of the parking lot, gunning it down Minwack Drive so I could get Sloane as quickly as possible. Drum Farm Lane wasn't too far, but who knew when the storm would start.
I made it just in time; I spotted Sloane with her hair flapping against her face and pulled over with my hazards flashing. She struggled to open the door against the wind, nearly slamming it on herself as she ducked into the passenger seat. The door closed, she took a deep breath and tried to push her hair out of her eyes, and then the rain started.
"Wow," she gasped.
A jagged branch of lightning ripped across the clouds and we both jumped as thunder blasted just moments later.
"You okay?" I asked as she tried to untangle her hair.
"Yeah," she said shakily. "Thank you for picking me up."
"Anytime," I said. "I got you some ice cream."
Her eyebrows were still creased, but her face brightened a bit. "Really? From Ruby Love?"
"Yeah."
She dug into the bag on the floor as I started the windshield wipers and put the car in drive. "Oh, Espresso Flake, my favorite. What'd you get yourself?"
"Nice try," I said. "I don't like you enough to eat Mint Moose Tracks instead of Espresso Flake."
She didn't quite laugh, but I saw the corners of her mouth flick up. Another rumble of thunder drummed through the sky and she shivered.
"I hate storms," she said.
"I know," I replied. "We'll be home right away."
She nodded, staring out the window silently as I drove carefully down the streets, my wipers barely able to keep up with the sudden downpour. Thankfully, I had an underground parking spot for my car, so once we arrived at the building we didn't have to go outside.
The awkwardness from that morning was still there, but we tried to proceed like things were normal. We didn't always finish work around the same time, but we had a sort of routine for when we did. Sloane insisted I should shower first since I smelled like gasoline, and I asked her how many dogs had puked on her today, and she conceded that she was puked on more times than I was and begrudgingly accepted the first shower.
While she showered, I watched TV. Sloane took forever, but I figured her job was harder than mine, so she deserved to go first. Plus, it meant that usually she'd start making something for dinner, and by the time I finished, I could help with the easier parts of it since I couldn't cook worth shit. Then she'd chill while I cleaned up, we'd watch a movie or something together, and that was it.
We were at the "me-in-the-shower-and-her-cooking" part of the routine when the power went out.
My first thought was that thankfully the power waited to cut out when I was the one naked in a dark room instead of Sloane. My second was that I was naked in a dark room, and as I wasn't about to ask Sloane to help me out of the shower, I had to do it myself without tripping and falling.
I turned the shower off and carefully stepped over the edge of the tub. Shivering, I patted the air in front of me, trying to figure out where the towel rack was, when there was an urgent knock at the door.
"Jimin?" Sloane called. "The power's out!"
"I know," I said. "Give me a sec, I'll be right out."
She was quiet for a moment. "Um, do you want me to—"
"Nope."
"I was just going to open the door and—"
"I'm fine, Sloane."
"—pass you a flashlight?"
I sighed. "Uh, yeah, that might help."
"Okay," she said. "I'm opening the door."
"Just... don't come in," I said quickly.
"I promise."
A sliver of grey light appeared where Sloane opened the door. I cupped myself instinctively, but she only opened it enough to snake her arm through the opening. Reaching forward, I grabbed the flashlight she held out, and she took her arm back and shut the door immediately.
"Thank you," I called.
"No problem."
I toweled off and dressed quickly. When I left the bathroom, Sloane was standing by the balcony door, her arms folded across her chest and shoulders tense as she stared at the jagged lights streaking across the sky.
"The power'll be back on before you know it," I said as I walked up behind her.
She nodded and sniffed, brushing a hand across her face. Before I could ask if she'd been crying, she turned and smiled.
"How do you feel about half-cooked penne and medium-rare chicken for dinner?" she asked, her voice as watery as the weather was.
"Sounds like something I'd make," I teased.
She made a sniffling sort of laugh, flinching when thunder roared a moment later.
"Why don't you chill for a bit?" I said. "I'll make us some sandwiches, and by then the power will be back so you can make something good."
She smiled and shook her head. "I can help."
The thunder cracked and she flinched again.
"Only if I'm the one in charge of the knives," I said. "Don't need you stabbing yourself every time there's thunder."
"I'm not that bad!" she protested, but agreed that I could be in charge of anything that required knives.
The power didn't come back once we'd finished making the sandwiches. While we ate, I called our landlord, James, but he didn't answer. I figured he was probably pretty busy and shrugged, checking the town Facebook group to see if there was any information there.
"Sounds like it's all of Haven Falls," I said as I scrolled through my feed.
"Really?" Sloane said, nibbling on the corner of her sandwich.
"Yeah, some guy named Frank DeBlanco called the power company and—oh! That's the guy who was at the table at Ruby Love’s."
Sloane frowned. "What?"
"Victor Kim was being a creep to some lady. I told him to... well, doesn't matter. Like he was gonna listen to me. But this guy, Frank, said something too and Victor backed off."
"Was she okay?" Sloane asked. "The lady?"
I nodded. "Yeah, seemed to be. She was with her kids. I think he talked to her after."
"I bet she appreciated that," she said, smiling. "You really are a nice guy."
The term made me prickle with annoyance, but I forced a smile. "Thanks."
She could tell it was a fake smile and frowned, putting her sandwich down. "What did I say?"
"Nothing," I said quickly. "I appreciate it."
She didn't quite believe me, but didn't press the issue. We finished eating and I tried calling James again. He eventually picked up and said he was working at getting the backup generator on so we'd at least have some emergency lighting. The storm began to fade and around seven, the rain had stopped completely. Still, the power stayed out, and I groaned when I checked the Facebook group again.
"It's probably going to be out all night," I said.
"Seriously?" Sloane said, looking up from her phone. "Darn. Do you have an extra one of those battery pack things?"
"Yeah," I said, getting up off the couch. "I've got a couple. They should be all charged up."
"At least our phones won't die."
I dug them out of the storage room and gave one to her, putting the other next to my bed since I figured my phone would last till then. Awkwardly, we sat in the living room, not quite sure what to do when we didn't have lights or TV or the internet.
"Wanna watch a movie?" she asked suddenly. "We can eat the ice cream you got and just have a movie night."
I raised my eyebrows. "Uh, that sounds great, but—"
"On my laptop," she said. "The battery should be okay for a while and I think I've got Atonement downloaded."
A lesson no one had ever taught me was that you should never watch Atonement with anyone you were insanely attracted to but weren't in a relationship with. It was an oddly specific lesson, but one I would have greatly appreciated before agreeing to watch it with Sloane. One moment we were watching a well-written but standard historical romance; the next, Cecilia was wearing a skin-tight green evening gown and getting nailed against a bookshelf in a library. Sure, you didn't see much skin besides a knee here and a fumbling of some period-appropriate trousers there, but damn.
It probably wouldn't have been so bad, but since we were watching it on her laptop, Sloane couldn't exactly curl up in her usual TV-watching position beside me. Instead, she had slowly splayed across the couch as if she was melting. Instead of pressing against my arm, her elbow ended up resting near my knee, and eventually her head made its way to my thigh.
I stared straight ahead at the laptop the entire scene. For some reason, I thought that would be better than chuckling awkwardly or looking away or making a comment. For some reason, I just let my best friend lay her head on my thigh, her hair splayed across my lap, and I didn't say shit. It wasn't even like I was secretly enjoying the feel of her so close to me. I was miserable and on edge, and I couldn't bring myself to ask her to move because she was comfortable.
If that wasn't bad enough, the movie had to go and be sad. Like Sloane needed any more sadness. Like she needed to pretend she wasn't crying against my jeans, like she needed a reminder of all the shitty things that were going on in her life.
When the movie finished, Sloane sat up, leaned over to close her laptop, and then turned to me.
"What'd you think?"
"That was... something," I said.
Her face fell. "Oh no. You hated it."
"I didn't!" I said. "It was just, you know, a... movie."
She studied me for a moment, then looked down and brushed her hair over her shoulder.
"Are things weird with us right now?"
My eyes nearly burst out of my face.
"What?"
"Like... do you feel like we're off?" she asked. "Like, I said you were a nice guy earlier and you seemed upset about that."
I shrugged. "I mean, I just... you always hear people talk about how nice guys aren't really nice. I guess I just don't want to be one of those nice guys who says he's a nice guy. You know?"
"Oh," she said. "Okay. I never even thought of that."
"It's fine. It was nothing."
"Things are still weird, though."
"Really?" I said. "I feel like maybe they're not."
"Is it because of this morning?" she asked bluntly.
I sighed. "No, I just—"
"Because I didn't mean to laugh," she said, looking back up at me. "I wasn't... I know it must have sounded so mean but I was just surprised and—"
"Sloane, it's fine," I said. "I mean, I was in my underwear. Big deal. I Whatever. I mean, we're roommates. Frankly, it's surprising it hasn't happened sooner."
She looked unconvinced. "You were upset that I laughed."
"I didn't—"
"Please don't lie to me."
I stopped, then sighed. "Okay. I was a bit embarrassed."
"I knew it," she said softly, her face crumpling. "I wasn't laughing at you, I swear. I just... it wasn't anything about you at all."
"It's fine," I said again. "Look, no one likes being laughed at, especially by a pretty girl when they're in their boxers first thing in the morning. I know you didn't mean it. I just... it just threw me off, that's all."
"I'm sorry," she said. "I really am."
I smiled awkwardly and jokingly punched her on the shoulder. "It's fine, champ. We're good."
Champ? Champ?! What kind of moron... who the fuck calls anyone champ, let alone... I cringed, my cheeks burning.
She didn't call me out for sounding like a complete dick, instead biting her lip with sparkling eyes. "Did you call me pretty?"
Oh no.
"Well, I mean... yeah," I said. "You know. Like... you're pretty. Everyone thinks you're pretty. I have eyes, you know."
"Oh," she said, laughing awkwardly. "Well, thank you."
"I think I'm going to go to bed," I said, my voice higher than usual. "It feels like it was a long day."
"Yeah," Sloane said. "Me too."
We stood up at the same time, nearly crashing into each other, then I stepped back so she could go first. I grabbed my flashlight and my phone, heading for my room as she ducked into the bathroom, and didn't come back out until I heard her bedroom door close. Even then, I waited a few minutes for good measure before going to the bathroom and brushing my teeth.
The whole thing was uncomfortable. All I could do was hope that the next day would be less weird. Well, that and try to forget about the awkward arm punch before I called her champ.
Champ.
What the fuck was I thinking?
My face was red again as I got back to my room and stripped to my boxers, the light from the flashlight bobbing as I got into bed. It wasn't that late, but I hadn't been exaggerating; I was tired. Yawning, I plugged my phone into the power bank I kept charged up for emergencies and pulled the covers up to my chin. The apartment was quiet, the wind had disappeared, and I couldn't hear Sloane crying.
I didn't quite remember falling asleep, but I did. Something jostled me into a drowsy state of confusion and my eyes opened to see light flashing across my room. Seconds later, I was thrown out of that drowsy state when thunder crashed so loudly I thought it was coming from right beside me.
Sloane, I thought.
The power was still out and my room was almost pitch-black, save for the flashes of lightning. Just before thunder boomed again, I thought I heard my door open. Blinking rapidly, my eyes adjusted to the darkness just enough to see a sliver of slightly-less-dark-darkness appear at my door.
"Jimin?" Sloane whispered shakily through the dark.
"You okay?" I asked, my voice hoarse.
"This is so stupid," she said, half-sobbing. "I'm terrified."
"Want me to come sit with you?"
She didn't respond right away. The door pushed open a little wider, though it was still so dark I couldn't even see her outline standing there until lightning flashed again, illuminating everything for a split second. The image of her standing there with mussed hair, clutching the door frame with one hand and her other on the door knob, was burned into my eyes as darkness filled the room again.
"Can I come lie down with you?" she asked.
Before I could respond, thunder crashed. Immediately, there was another flash of lightning, and I saw Sloane's bottom lip firmly wedged between her teeth, her long T-shirt almost glowing in the sudden brightness.
She wanted to lie down with me. The words weren't processing right. I broke them down into simpler statements. She... that was Sloane. Wanted... obvious enough. To lie down, that made sense. With me.
Sloane wanted to lie down with me.
"In my bed?" I finally said.
She waited for the clap of thunder to fade before speaking.
"You're right," she whispered. "It's weird. I'm sorry. I'll just—"
"No, no, it's... it's fine," I said tiredly. "Just let me put some pants on. I'm in my boxers."
"I don't care."
"But—"
"Please?" she said, her voice cracking.
Thunder seemed to vibrate the air around us and she started forward, barely waiting for me to say yes before she was pulling the blankets away and burying herself beneath them.
If that was all it was, it wouldn't have been so bad. It wasn't, though; she tossed the blankets over herself and then scooted forward until her body was pressed against mine and her face was on my chest. I stared, wide-eyed, at the darkness that represented the top of her head, her breath hot on my skin as she took short, staggered gasps of air.
"I'm sorry," she whimpered. "I feel so dumb but it just—"
She cut herself off with a whimper as the thunder cracked again, far worse than the storm had been earlier in the day.
My arms went around her instinctively. I regretted it almost immediately; I had no right to be holding her like that. I had even less of a right to be holding her like that when I was in nothing but my boxers and she was in a thin T-shirt and...
God, I hoped she had at least panties on, because she sure as hell didn't have pants on. Her legs were bare, smooth and soft and chilled against mine where they touched.
I swallowed hard, willing myself not to think of anything but trying to make Sloane feel better. I couldn't do that to her. I couldn't handle the guilt of enjoying how she felt against me.
"It's just a storm," I whispered. "It'll be over before you know it."
She sniffed but didn't say anything.
"I know they suck," I said. "I know you hate them."
"I'm so embarrassed," she said, her lips brushing my skin. "I just threw myself into your bed because I can't handle a storm like a fucking adult."
I tried not to laugh, but she felt my chest shake.
"Don't laugh at me," she choked. "I said I was sorry for earlier and—"
"I wasn't," I said. "I swear. I was laughing 'cause you said 'fucking' and you never swear."
Her giggle was shaky, but it was a giggle all the same. "Well, shit."
I couldn't hold the laugh back that time, but she laughed with me. And that was great, it would have been great, except when she laughed, her... well...
There was no classy way to say it. When she laughed, her tits moved against my chest, and I could feel her nipples underneath that thin shirt, and that was something I couldn't ignore.
I bit down on my lip as hard as I could, trying to shock myself out of a reaction, but it was hopeless. All I could do was shift slightly away from Sloane under the guise of laughter, hoping she hadn't felt anything and hoping she wouldn't insist on moving closer.
"Thank you," she said as she stopped laughing. Her nose nuzzled my chest, her face so close I could feel her eyelashes when she blinked. "I was trying to be calm but it just kept getting worse and I thought... I just couldn't."
"Worse?" I said. "How long has it been storming?"
"About fifteen minutes," she said. "I'm sorry I woke you up."
"It's okay. I'm glad you did. I don't want you to be scared."
"Thank you."
"You can stop thanking me and stop apologizing."
She snuggled in closer, her hips almost brushing against my dick. My stomach jumped into my throat, but I was able to keep my hips away from hers.
"Okay," she said. "Just kick me out when you want me to go."
I didn't want her to go, but I didn't want to tell her that. "Will do."
She flinched a few moments later as thunder crashed again, the wind howling against the bedroom window as rain pounded it.
"Why are you so scared of storms?" I asked her when the crash had faded.
"I always have been," she said. "I mean, if you want the legit traumatic event behind it, it was probably when I was a kid and my parents took me camping, and they stayed in the trailer with my aunt and uncle while my cousin and I slept in the tent, and there was a storm that night and the tent blew away."
"What?" I said.
"Yeah. The pegs came out of the ground and the poles snapped, so the tent ended up kind of wrapped around a tree."
"With you in it?"
"Uh-huh."
"Jesus, Sloane."
"So I've been kinda scared of them since then. And also of tents."
I choked on a laugh. "I mean, that's understandable, I guess. Why didn't I know that about you?"
She shrugged and her nipples poked against my chest again. I almost groaned—almost—but managed to stay quiet.
"What are you scared of?" she asked.
"Clowns," I said.
She giggled. "No, you aren't. What are you really scared of?"
My biggest fear at that moment was her discovering the fact that I was harder than a rock, but I couldn't exactly say that. I also couldn't explain that I was terrified of losing her, or tell her how I felt.
"You," I said, nudging her jokingly. "You terrify me."
She was half-laughing when lightning flashed and thunder boomed at the same time. A whimpering sort of shriek was the only warning I had before she pressed her entire body against me again.
I knew she felt it. I mean, I felt her against it, so it only made sense. My body went rigid and my breath caught in my throat, every muscle in my body frozen in a state of tense terror.
This was it, I thought. This was the moment when I lost my best friend.
When she didn't move, I didn't know what to do. Slowly I let out a breath, waiting for her to panic, but she didn't say anything. For a long moment, I waited. I waited for her to pull back, for her to laugh, for her to push me away or tell me off, but she didn't.
"I'm sorry," I breathed when I couldn't take the silence anymore. "I... I should've told you I... I'm sorry. I didn't want you to think I... you're my friend and I didn't... fuck. You should go, Sloane."
"Why?"
"Because I... I like you."
She didn't say anything to that, and she still didn't move. My mouth was dry and I licked my lips, breathing shallowly through my mouth.
"I'm sorry," I said again.
"You are a nice guy," she whispered. "And I don't mean that in the weird bad way that you think it is."
I frowned. "What?"
I felt her cheeks pressing against my chest as she smiled. "You're trying to kick me out of your bed because you like me and you don't want me to feel uncomfortable."
"Well... yeah," I said helplessly. "I mean... I don't want you to think I'm just trying to, you know... you're my friend, Sloane. I don't want to lose you."
"And that makes you a nice guy. A real nice guy. And you know what else?"
I swallowed hard. "What?"
"I don't want to be a raccoon anymore."
Neither of us moved. Neither of us spoke. I immediately started overthinking because what the fuck else do you do when you're holding your best friend and admitting that you're attracted to her? Really, what the fuck are you supposed to do when says she doesn't want to be a raccoon? What does that even mean? Did she mean she wanted to stop dating losers like Evan and Nero and whoever the hell the other ones were? Did she mean she wanted to date me because she thought I was a nice guy? And she knew I was hard, she could feel it. What the fuck are you supposed to do when the most beautiful girl in the world trails her fingers down the side of your body? Was she honest-to-God slowly moving her leg up over my hip and hooking it around my back?
She was. Holy shit, she was. She was moving in slow-motion but her leg was wrapping around me and her body was shifting so my dick was between her legs and...
The good news was that Sloane was wearing panties. If she hadn't been, I might have come all over her immediately. As it stood, things were close. Her pussy was so warm I could feel it through the thin layers of fabric between us. She didn't say anything as we touched, but I felt air drawn sharply into her mouth as she inhaled, her face still against my chest.
My mouth dropped open as she shifted her hips gently, so subtle in her movements that it could have been mistaken for a general twitch, except for the fact that she did it again. And then she did it again. And the third time she did it, my arms tightened around her of their own accord.
She kissed my chest, her lips as gentle as flower petals against my skin. I was almost afraid to touch her, but my hands had other ideas. I traced my fingers down her spine, trying not to groan when it made her shiver against me. When my hands reached the small of her back, I hesitated, not quite believing she was real, not quite ready to touch her ass. Instead, I crumpled her shirt into my hand, tugging it up enough to feel the bare skin just above her panties.
When my fingers made contact with her skin, she moved purposely. I pulled my hand away, sure she'd suddenly realized what she was doing, certain that she was about to run away, but she didn't. She exhaled, her breath tickling my chest, and then I felt her ribs shift as she inhaled, and when she exhaled again, her breath brushed against my lips.
Lightning flashed just then. Sloane's eyes were level with mine, sparkling in the sudden burst of light, so close I couldn't even see the rest of her face. I knew she was smiling, though. I felt it as soon as the lightning crackled out of existence and her lips touched mine.
It was too dark for her to see that my eyes were still open, widened in shock as she kissed me. When I finally seemed to realize that the soft mouth touching mine was real, and that it was there on purpose, and that Sloane was fucking kissing me, I kissed her back as hard as I'd ever kissed anyone before.
Her smile widened as I brought my hand to her neck, holding her head still as I explored her mouth. Her arms were around my waist, fingertips scratching lightly along my back as I slipped my tongue past her lips. I kissed her until I couldn't breathe, until I was dizzy and craving more of her mouth, more of the sweet taste of her lips, more of her pressed against me.
"Jimin," she whispered, her breath hot on my lips.
"Yeah?" I gasped back.
"I want you to touch me," she said.
"Where?"
She shivered as thunder rolled outside.
"Everywhere."
I wasn't going to say no to that.
I touched her slowly, sliding my hand beneath her shirt and kissing her as I traced my fingers along her waist. Her stomach muscles fluttered beneath my fingers as I touched a spot near her bellybutton; when I did it again, she shuddered and inhaled sharply. I made a mental note of that spot before dragging my fingers along her ribs, feeling the way they rose and fell as her breathing quickened, and finally brought my hand up to cup her breasts.
She wasn't the only one who made a noise as I touched them; I groaned as I finally felt the weight of her breast in my palm, her bare skin softer than I could have ever imagined and her nipple delightfully hard and crinkled. Her shirt rode up, baring her stomach, and she moved closer to me so it was pressed against mine as I fondled her.
I made sure to feel every inch of her breast and paid extra special attention to her perky little nipple before moving my hand to the other one. Her hips rolled against me as I played with her other breast, her breath hot against my lips each time I kissed her. I stayed that way for a long time, longer than I could have called comfortable, but I couldn't get enough of her breasts.
"You can, um, kiss them, you know," she finally said.
"Yeah?" I breathed. "Awesome. Okay."
She shifted against me, wriggling out from my arms. I felt her sit up beside me, kneeling as she removed her shirt, and prayed for lightning to flash so I could at least see a glimpse of her.
Someone out there was listening, and there was a long moment of brightness as lightning filled the sky, long enough for me to truly appreciate the beauty of Sloane's tits and the perfection that was her body before the world went dark again.
"You're beautiful," I groaned. "Jesus, Sloane."
She laughed and I expected her to lie back in my arms but instead felt her shift on the bed again. When she returned to my side a few moments later, I realized why: her panties were gone.
Before I could say anything, her breasts were pressed to my face. I groaned, kissing the heavenly mounds of flesh that were pushed against me. I didn't go for her nipple right away, instead inhaling deeply and sighing. She smelled amazing, a scent I couldn't explain, something distinctly feminine and arousing and just so her. I gently squeezed one breast while I focused my lips on the other, licking between them before kissing along the underside.
Sloane squirmed against me and I waited until she stilled before taking her nipple into my mouth. She made a high-pitched noise as I flicked my tongue against it, another one when I grazed my teeth along it, and a full moan when I sucked on it firmly. The sound of her, the smell of her, the taste of her: all of it made my cock throb, aching as her body brushed it occasionally.
I wanted her so much.
She seemed to want me just as much. A few moments later, she made a frustrated noise before grabbing my hand and shoving it between her legs.
"Please," she whimpered.
"Since you asked so nicely," I whispered, and she giggled.
I explored her folds as she gasped and squirmed beside me. Her nipple was still in my mouth when I slipped a finger inside of her and she moaned, squeezing my shoulder. The hot wetness of her pussy gripped my finger, clutching it as I pushed it in her slowly, relishing the feel of her tight hole around me.
"Jimin," she moaned. "Oh my God."
I fingered her slowly, increasing my speed only when she whimpered in frustration, adding a second finger only when she was so wet I could feel it coating both my palm and the back of my hand. She pushed herself against my hand, shuddering as I continued tonguing her nipple, her breath coming in short gasps. Her arm wrapped around my head, holding me tight to her chest, and I knew she was close when her legs startled to tremble.
"Coming," she whimpered. "Oh, my God..."
I don't think she heard the roar of thunder that happened as she came. I barely heard it; she moaned so loudly and bucked her hips so wildly that I could barely sense the world that existed outside the covers of my bed. Her pussy walls clenched around my fingers, holding them in place.
I had never heard anything so beautiful, felt something so amazing, or wanted someone so much as I wanted her. My cock ached, throbbing painfully in my boxers, precum staining the front of them.
"Wow," she finally gasped. "Oh, my God. Wow."
I smiled, her breasts still pressed to my face as I withdrew my hand from between her legs.
"That was amazing," she said.
"You're amazing," I whispered.
Her laugh was tired and breathless as she clutched me to her.
"Just give me a sec to catch my breath," she whispered. "That was... whew. I don't remember the last time I came that hard."
"Careful, you're going to give me a big head," I said.
"I thought I already had," she teased, bringing her hand between us.
Her fingers trailed along my stomach to the waistband of my boxers. I swallowed hard, desperate to feel something—her hand, her mouth, her pussy, my hand... anything, really—against my cock. My pulse quickened in anticipation as she pulled my boxers down, my dick springing out. I lifted my hip to help her, kicking them off when they were low enough.
I caught glimpses of her as lightning flashed. Her eyes sparkled as she looked at me, her lip was tucked between her teeth, and her hand was teasingly close to my dick. Tension curled through my muscles, up my back to my shoulders and down my arms as I waited for her to wrap her fingers around me.
When she finally did, I shuddered, my cock twitching in her palm. She kissed me, gripping my shaft lightly, but her hand didn't move. It wasn't enough; I needed more. I was desperate for more. I couldn't help pushing my hips forward, but even as I did, she didn't move or tighten her grip.
I didn't say anything. I didn't even make a noise. I took a breath, my dick throbbing painfully, and when lightning flashed again, there was an amused look on Sloane's face.
"You want me, right?" she asked as thunder rumbled.
"More than anything," I admitted. "So much."
Her hand moved away from my cock and I almost cried until she mirrored her action from earlier, slinging her leg around my waist. I swallowed hard as the heat from her pussy radiated against me. I was sure she was going to sink onto me, but she brushed her slit along my shaft instead of letting me enter her.
I couldn't complain. It felt good. Her pussy was wet and hot and it was rubbing against my dick. It's just that it wasn't enough. I was so hard I could barely think. All I wanted was to come, to sink inside her, to jack off, anything, and instead she just ground her pussy against me.
I didn't say anything, but when I pushed forward a bit and Sloane stopped, I couldn't stop myself from making a soft, frustrated noise. Sloane heard it and she kissed me, her lips curling up as she reached up to brush my hair off my forehead.
"Please," I whispered against her mouth. "Sloane, I..."
She kissed me again before moving her mouth away from me. Her torso pressed mine, her legs trapped my dick between them, and she brought her lips to my ear.
"You are the nicest guy I know," she said. "And I like that. But I need you to be a little bit bad, too."
"What?" I said.
"Just a little," she said, her voice high-pitched, almost teasing.
"I don't—"
"You're going to have to fuck me, Jimin," she said. "I know you're the kind of guy who's going to be all sweet and respectful and make sure I'm sure, and make sure I'm comfortable, and make me come a zillion times before you even consider it yourself. And I'll let you do that to me next time, if you still want to be with me. This time, though? You're going to have to fuck me."
"I mean, are you sure you—"
"Ah, ah," she said, and she rolled her hips so my cock slid along her slit. "I just told you what you need to do, and asking if I'm sure was not part of it."
"But—"
"Yes," she whispered. "Yes, I'm sure."
"I don't..." I groaned as she moved against me, teasing my dick again. "Oh my God, Sloane."
She made a soft noise and moved her lips away from my ear. When I caught a glimpse of her by the next flash of lightning, she was looking up at me, her eyes glazed with mischievous desire.
I panted as she teased me, as her pussy slid up and down my shaft, as the tip of my dick brushed her hole but didn't enter her. My hips moved forward, yearning for her, but she kept a steady pace of torture. She was driving me crazy, but that wasn't... I liked her. I didn't want to just fuck her, I wanted...
I couldn't even remember what I wanted. She tormented me with her body, touching me, teasing me, playing with me. She was sure, she said. She wanted me to fuck her. She wanted me to be selfish and use her and that wasn't something I'd ever done.
"Please, Jimin?" she whispered.
Her pussy slid along my cock slowly. My body decided it was time for me to stop overthinking, and when her dripping hole was near the tip of my cock, I shifted suddenly and thrust forward, shoving myself inside her without so much as a word or a second thought.
The noise she made started as a yelp and turned quickly into a moan as I buried my cock in her drenched pussy. I moved my hand down, grabbing her ass and pulling her against me hard, driving myself forward until every inch of my dick was inside her.
"Yes," she breathed. "Oh, that's so—"
I didn't let her finish. I kissed her hard, absorbing whatever word she was about to say with my lips, letting it trail off into a whimper that vibrated against my mouth. Without pulling out, I used my body to guide her onto her back, feeling her moan as her legs spread wider for me.
She was beneath me when the next strike of lightning flashed. Everything about her was perfect: the perfect little smirk on her face, the perfect teeth biting her perfect lip, her perfect breasts heaving as she watched me.
I reached down, grabbed her hair, and kissed her again as I started slamming my cock into her body.
She squealed against my mouth, gasping as I bit her lip, moaning as I fucked her as hard as I could.
"Yes," she moaned. "Oh my God, Jimin."
I didn't say anything. I couldn't. All I could do was bury myself inside her, feeling the way her tunnel stretched around me, drunk on the wetness of her pussy and the feel of her tits bouncing and the taste of her skin as I moved my lips to her neck.
She clutched me, her fingernails digging into my back as I fucked her the way she wanted me to. After a bit, one hand moved up to my head and her fingers worked their way into my hair, pulling it as I nipped her neck.
"Make me come," she demanded, her teeth clenched. "I wanna come all over your dick."
"You better fucking do it then," I shot back, and I shoved my hand between our bodies.
Sloane let out an animalistic noise, a shrieking sort of moan that echoed in my ears as she grabbed at me. I burrowed myself inside her as I fingered her clit, her body accepting me again and again. The fingernails of one hand dug painfully into my back as she pulled my hair with the other, and I had no idea how long it was before she was gasping and tensing beneath me.
"Gonna come," she whimpered. "Oh my God, Jimin, oh my God, oh my..."
She wailed as she came, trembling beneath me. I could feel her pussy spasm around my dick, clenching hard as her hips bucked. If that wasn't enough, she started saying my name, again and again until she was mumbling incoherently.
Well, she might not have been mumbling. She might have been speaking perfectly, but the rush of blood pounding in my ears prevented me from truly knowing. I groaned as my muscles clenched, pressure building and building until I thought I was going to pass out. When I came, I grunted, spilling inside Sloane as my mind went fuzzy, my eyes squeezed shut as wave after wave of relief overtook my body.
I'd never come so hard in my life.
The sound of my own breathing was the first thing I heard as some semblance of brain activity returned. The next was Sloane's breathing, followed by the feel of her breath against me. I was still inside her, still holding myself over her, and still had her hair clutched in my fist.
"Fuck," I whispered, loosening my grip on her hair. "Are you okay?"
She burst out laughing, jostling beneath me.
"Yes," she giggled. "Oh my God, yes."
I chuckled half-heartedly as I pulled out of her and collapsed beside her. "Sorry. I, uh... I know you said you didn't want questions but I should've asked before I—"
"You know I'm on the pill," she said. "It's okay."
I let out a breath that I hadn't been aware I was holding. "I didn't, uh, hurt you or anything, did I?"
Instead of responding, she wrapped her arms around me and pressed her lips to mine.
"It was amazing," she said after she pulled away. "You were... it was so good."
I smiled, closing my eyes as she rested her forehead against mine.
"Can this be a thing?" she asked after a moment. "Like... can we... you know, date? If you want me like that?"
It was my turn to laugh.
"What?" she asked indignantly.
"I'm in love with you, Sloane," I murmured sleepily. "Of course I want you like that."
Lightning picked that moment to flash again. I opened my eyes to see Sloane looking at me, a smile on her face instead of the look of horror I thought might be there. She didn't say it back, and that was okay. I'd been in love with her for a while already; she was just finding out about it. I didn't need her to say it. I just needed her to know it.
She kissed me softly as the lightning faded, barely shivering as the accompanying thunder crashed.
"I think I'm a panda now," she said.
I burst out laughing. "What?"
"Like a full panda. Instead of a trash panda."
"Okay," I chuckled. "Why?"
"'Cause pandas only want bamboo and you’re strong and reliable and I only want you."
It was ridiculous, and I loved it. "I... thanks."
She kissed me again, then wriggled so she was comfortable in my arms as I pulled the blankets over us.
"G'night, Jimin."
I held her close, kissing the top of her head and sighing as everything started to feel right in the world.
He sat alone at the bar nursing the whiskey neat that the bartender poured for him an hour ago. The single ball of ice had since melted and the condensation now slid down the glass like tears. If this was the 1950’s he’d light up a cigarette and fill his lungs with the poison hoping to ease the pain of her not showing up… again.
“Sir, we are closing soon.”
Taehyung glanced up at the bartender, eyes glossed with pain.
“Just 5 more minutes, maybe she’ll show. Please” he begged.
“Of course.” He could tell the bartender took pity on him.
She wasn’t going to show, she never showed. Letter after letter, phone call after phone call, night after night. He waited. Still she never showed.
Was it truly over? Had she finally moved on from him?
Taehyung had gotten so lost in his work he couldn’t even remember where the trouble in their relationship began and what caused it to finally end. He felt betrayed, like they could’ve talked it out, went to therapy didn’t matter which kind. Regular, couples, hell he’d do electro convulsive therapy if it meant she would come back.
“Sir-“
“Yeah, I know.” He said putting a hundred dollar bill on the table. “Keep the change Miss.”
Taehyung turned up the collar on his coat then decided against it as it was late and probably better not to look like a villain from Gotham walking down the middle of Eighth street. The thud of the door behind him snapped him from his thoughts as the cold embraced him and his broken heart.
He stood there for a long moment, the rain slowly dampening the shoulders of his coat. The city had quieted for the night, leaving only the occasional passing car and the hum of a flickering neon sign across the street.
Taehyung slipped his hands into his pockets and started walking without any destination in mind. Home wasn’t an option. Every corner of that apartment still belonged to her.
Her slippers still sat beside the front door. The lavender candle she insisted smelled like spring remained untouched on the coffee table, and her favorite coffee mug with the chipped handle still occupied its usual place in the cabinet because she had once smiled and said, “Imperfections make things special.”
The memory made him let out a hollow laugh. If that were true, then why hadn’t his imperfections been enough for her to stay?
His phone buzzed in his pocket, and his heart leapt into his throat. For one foolish, desperate second, he thought it might be her. He pulled it out so quickly he nearly dropped it. The bright screen illuminated his face, and the name staring back at him made his chest sink.
Jimin.
The phone rang twice more before he finally answered.
“What?” he said, exhaustion heavy in his voice.
There was a brief pause on the other end before Jimin spoke. “You sound drunk.”
“I’m not.”
“You sound miserable.”
Taehyung let out a shaky breath, watching it disappear into the cold night air. “That’s because I am.”
Another silence settled between them.
“You’re waiting for her again, aren’t you?”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. Jimin knew him too well.
A sigh crackled through the speaker. “Tae… you can’t keep doing this to yourself.”
His jaw tightened. “Don’t.”
“She left six months ago.”
The words struck him like a physical blow.
Six months.
One hundred and eighty-three days.
He had counted every single one.
“You don’t know that,” he replied quietly.
“I know she hasn’t answered your calls.”
“Maybe she changed her number.”
“Taehyung…”
“Maybe she lost her phone. Maybe she’s sick. Maybe she’s—”
“She sent the divorce papers.”
The world seemed to stop around him.
Rain continued to fall, cold drops running down his face, but he barely felt them. Cars passed in the distance, their headlights blurring into streaks of light. All he could hear were those five words.
She sent the divorce papers.
She hadn’t forgotten him. She hadn’t been unable to reach him. She hadn’t been waiting for the right moment to come back. She had simply chosen not to.
His throat tightened painfully.
“I haven’t signed them,” he finally whispered.
The confession sounded pathetic even to his own ears, like a child refusing to accept the ending of a story.
“I know,” Jimin replied softly.
Taehyung closed his eyes.
“If I sign them… then it’s real.”
The words broke apart as they left him.
“If I sign them, then she’s really gone.”
Silence answered him for several long seconds.
Then Jimin spoke again, his voice gentler than before.
“I think she’s been gone for a long time, Tae.”
The tears came then.
Not the violent kind that stole your breath, but the quiet, exhausted kind that slipped free when there was nothing left to hold them back. They mixed with the rain as he stood alone in the middle of Eighth Street, grieving something that had already died long before tonight.
Because the truth was, he wasn’t waiting for her anymore.
He was waiting for the version of himself that existed when she still loved him—the man who smiled easily, who believed in forever, who never questioned whether he was enough.
And standing there beneath the cold rain, Taehyung finally realized that man wasn’t coming back either.
___
The weeks following the divorce passed in a haze so thick Taehyung could barely remember them. He went through the motions because his body knew what to do even when his mind didn’t. He woke up, showered, dressed, went to work, smiled when necessary, and returned home to an apartment that no longer felt like home. To everyone around him, he appeared to be coping. Grieving, perhaps, but coping nonetheless.
They couldn’t have been more wrong.
The first thing to disappear was sleep.
At night, he would lie awake on his side of the bed, staring at the empty space beside him until the sun began peeking through the curtains. Some nights he swore he could still smell her shampoo lingering on the pillow she had left behind. Other nights he would wake in a panic, reaching across the mattress only to be greeted by cold sheets and crushing silence. Eventually, he stopped trying to sleep altogether.
Then came the drinking.
It started innocently enough—a glass of whiskey before bed to quiet his thoughts. One glass became two. Two became half a bottle. Before long, there wasn’t a single room in the apartment that didn’t contain an empty bottle tucked somewhere out of sight. The warmth of alcohol dulled the ache, if only for a few hours, and those few hours became the only peace he knew.
Then the apartment itself began to deteriorate alongside him.
Laundry piled in corners. Dirty dishes crowded the sink. Dust settled on every surface. The once meticulously organized home she had spent years making beautiful slowly transformed into something unrecognizable. Taehyung no longer cared. He moved through the rooms like a ghost haunting his own life.
He had tried removing traces of her at first. The photographs came down. The framed vacation pictures were shoved into closets. Her favorite records were boxed away. Yet somehow she remained.
She was in the lavender candle sitting untouched on the coffee table.
In the sweater she had forgotten to take.
In the dent on the couch cushion where she always curled up to read.
In the silence.
God, the silence.
It was everywhere.
Friends noticed the change almost immediately. Jimin called constantly during the first month, then every few days, then once a week. Taehyung ignored every call. Jungkook showed up unannounced several times only to be turned away at the door. Eventually, even they stopped trying.
Isolation suited him or so he told himself.
The truth was far uglier.
Because when there was no one left to distract him, all Taehyung had were memories. He replayed every conversation, every argument, every missed opportunity with obsessive precision. He searched desperately for the exact moment everything had gone wrong, convinced that if he could just find it, somehow he could undo it.
But memories are cruel things. They change shape depending on who’s looking at them.
What had once been arguments became betrayals.
What had once been misunderstandings became deliberate acts of cruelty.
The woman he had loved so fiercely slowly transformed in his mind into someone else entirely.
Someone who had abandoned him.
Someone who had chosen to watch him drown.
Someone who had never loved him as deeply as he had loved her.
And resentment, once planted, grows quickly in lonely places.
One sleepless night, nearly four months after the divorce had been finalized, Taehyung found himself staring at her social media profile.
He told himself it was harmless.
He only wanted to know if she was okay.
That lie lasted less than a week.
Soon he knew where she lived. He knew she had moved into a small apartment on the west side of the city. He knew she still bought coffee every Thursday morning from the café on Pine Street and that she preferred to sit by the window with a book in hand. He knew she had cut her hair shorter. He knew she had started smiling again.
The photographs devastated him.
Because while he had been surviving, she had been living.
And she looked happy.
Truly happy.
The realization hollowed him out.
He spent an entire evening sitting in the dark, whiskey bottle dangling loosely from his fingertips, staring at a picture of her laughing with friends. He couldn’t stop looking at it. Couldn’t stop zooming in. Couldn’t stop wondering who had taken the photo and what had made her smile like that.
By dawn, the sadness had become something else.
Something colder. Something dangerous. Because grief eventually reaches a crossroads. You either learn to let go or you decide someone must pay for your suffering.
And as Taehyung stood across the street from her apartment building for the first time, hidden beneath the shadows of a nearby awning while rain drizzled softly around him, he realized with terrifying clarity that he no longer wanted closure.
He wanted answers.
And if she wouldn’t willingly give them to him, he would take them himself.
___
Detectives Namjoon and Seokjin Kim paused just inside the doorway, neither man speaking as the full weight of the scene settled over them.
Rain lashed against the apartment windows, each flash of lightning illuminating the apartment in stark, ghostly bursts. The city skyline stretched beyond the glass like a sea of fractured diamonds, indifferent to the tragedy that had unfolded high above it.
The apartment itself looked as though a storm had torn through it.
Furniture lay overturned. Blood & brains covered the surfaces from top to bottom. Picture frames littered the hardwood floors, their shattered glass crunching beneath the boots of crime scene technicians. Family photographs had been ripped from albums and scattered throughout the living room. Several had been arranged deliberately around the bodies, as if someone had wanted the memories present for what came next.
“This wasn’t random,” Namjoon said quietly, surveying the destruction. “Whoever did this wanted them to remember.”
At the center of the room lay three bodies.
The woman and her boyfriend (A man identified as Yoongi Min) rested side by side on the floor, their fingers intertwined. Whether they had reached for one another in their final moments or had been positioned that way afterward, no one could say. Between them lay Taehyung.
He was on his back, one arm stretched toward the woman as though even in death he had been unable to stop reaching for her. His expression was eerily peaceful, a stark contrast to the devastation surrounding him.
For a long moment, neither detective spoke.
“Fuck,” Seokjin finally muttered.
A uniformed officer approached, holding a notepad. “We have a witness statement.”
Namjoon raised an eyebrow. “Neighbor?”
The officer nodded.
“Mrs. Choi in 14B. She said she’d been hearing arguing for hours. Thought about calling building security but decided against it.” The officer grimaced. “She admitted she’d been listening through the wall.”
“What did she hear?” Seokjin asked.
The officer glanced down at his notes.
“Mostly one-sided. Male voice asking the same questions over and over.”
“What questions?”
“‘Why wasn’t I enough?’ ‘Did you ever love me?’ ‘Was he worth throwing us away?’”
The officer swallowed.
“Mrs. Choi said she heard the woman crying. Then she heard another male voice arrive sometime after midnight. She says there was shouting near the front door followed by silence.”
“And after that?” Namjoon asked.
“Nothing for almost an hour.” The officer hesitated. “Then she heard music.”
“Music?”
“What did she hear?” Seokjin asked.
The officer nodded. “Mrs. Choi couldn’t remember the exact song title. She said it was something about a honeybee. She remembers because it kept playing over and over again. Same song. Same lyrics. For nearly an hour.”
Lightning cracked outside, momentarily bathing the room in stark white light.
Seokjin’s gaze drifted toward the stereo system sitting in the corner.
“A love song?” he murmured.
“No,” Namjoon corrected softly, his eyes settling on the three bodies lying together on the floor. “A eulogy.”
Near the record player sat a single handwritten letter addressed simply:
To the only woman I ever loved.
Beneath it rested three empty whiskey glasses.
Whatever answers Taehyung had come looking for, it was painfully clear he had never found them.
Namjoon crossed the room slowly, careful not to disturb the evidence markers scattered across the hardwood floor. His eyes settled on the sound system in the corner, its display still illuminated despite the chaos surrounding it.
“Crime scene techs said the music was still playing when they arrived,” he murmured.
Seokjin nodded. “The neighbor said it was on repeat.”
With a gloved hand, Namjoon pressed play.
Soft guitar drifted through the penthouse, followed by Olivia Rodrigo’s voice singing about love, longing, and the desperate hope of never having to watch someone you love become a stranger.
The song filled the apartment, weaving itself between overturned furniture and shattered glass. It transformed the scene from a crime scene into something far more tragic. A mausoleum dedicated to a relationship that had died long before the people inside it had.
Seokjin swallowed hard.
“He made them listen to this?” he asked quietly.
Namjoon’s gaze remained fixed on the three bodies lying together in the center of the room.
“No,” he said after a long pause. “I think he was listening to it for himself.”
The song continued to play, its melancholy melody echoing through the horror-drenched penthouse like a final goodbye.
___
The song had long since ended.
Only the soft patter of rain against the windows remained.
For the first time that night, the penthouse was silent.
Crime scene technicians moved through the apartment with quiet efficiency, photographing evidence, collecting personal effects, and carefully cataloging the remnants of three shattered lives. The once beautiful home now looked hollow, stripped of everything except grief.
The coroner’s team arrived shortly after three in the morning.
One by one, the bodies were prepared for transport.
First, the boyfriend.
Then her.
Seokjin watched as the Lead Coroner Hoseok Jung gently separate their intertwined hands, a small gesture that somehow felt more tragic than anything else he’d witnessed that night. He looked away, suddenly finding the skyline far easier to stomach than the scene unfolding behind him.
Taehyung was the last to leave.
As the attendants wheeled him past, his arm shifted beneath the white sheet, briefly exposing the faded gold band still clutched tightly in his hand. No one tried to remove it.
Some things, Seokjin supposed, belonged to the dead.
The elevator doors slid shut with a soft chime.
And just like that, they were gone.
Three people.
Three lives.
Reduced to evidence numbers and case files.
Seokjin exhaled slowly. “I’ve been doing this job for ten years,” he said quietly, staring at the empty space where the bodies had lain. “You’d think it would get easier.”
Namjoon stood beside the window, hands tucked into the pockets of his overcoat. The city below was beginning to wake. Headlights cut through the darkness. People would soon rise for work, make coffee, kiss their loved ones goodbye, completely unaware of the tragedy that had unfolded above them.
“No,” Namjoon said softly. “It shouldn’t.”
Seokjin glanced at him. “What do you mean?”
Namjoon’s eyes remained fixed on the city.
“People always talk about heartbreak like it’s romantic. Like loving someone so much it destroys you is somehow beautiful.” He paused, his reflection staring back at him in the glass. “But there’s nothing beautiful about this.”
He turned, surveying the ruined apartment one final time.
“Love isn’t possession. It isn’t obsession. And it certainly isn’t something you can force another person to give you.”
Thunder rumbled in the distance.
Namjoon adjusted his coat and headed for the door.
“The saddest part,” he said quietly, “is that somewhere along the way, three people stopped seeing each other as people and started seeing each other as answers.”
He reached for the handle.
“And answers,” he murmured, “have a way of disappointing us.”
The door clicked shut behind them.
“And I hope I never see what your face looks like going. A face I swear that I could spend my whole life knowing. Here's to hoping…”
trying to write while depressed produces some very dark stories. i pitched @vidalajoon a story the other day while we were on the phone about jimin and oc. they robbed a bank and ran out of gas during the police chase, so naturally they took themselves out and drove off a cliff into a canyon…
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