Pretty

pretty ♡

sleepwalking ● 12 | jjk

pairing: jungkook x fem!reader

summary: due to unfortunate circumstances, you ended up managing your ex-boyfriend’s band. you thought you’ve both made peace with it, but suddenly he’s very eager to prove to you that first love never dies.

genre: rockstar!jungkook / exes to lovers

warnings: explicit language, some angst, DESCRIPTIVE SMUT with maybe 1 pet name and 2 jokes, a bunch of reminiscing and relentless flirting (bc jungkook is dowwnnnn badddd), praise kink if you squint?, minors please don't interact

words: 7.6k

read from the beginning ○ masterlist

chapter 12 ► fall into your eyes like a grave, bury me to the sound of your name

You and Jungkook were silent for a solid fifteen minutes after you let him into your hotel room. You were both sitting on the bed, but with so much distance between you that it felt like you were on two different floors.

After your phone on the bedside table lit up for the sixth time in the last fifteen minutes, Jungkook finally spoke up.

“Your phone keeps buzzing,” he pointed out helpfully.

“Yeah.” You sighed. Being silent with Jungkook oddly felt less draining than dealing with whatever was happening on your phone. “It’s Kai.”

Jungkook nodded, remembering your brother’s misadventures the last time you two talked. He was almost happy to use that as an excuse to dance around the elephant in the room a little longer.

“How is he?” he asked. “With his broken…”

“Leg, yeah,” you finished, leaning your head against the headboard. “He’s home. Mum’s grounded him. She’s turned off the router and taken his Xbox, so he’s texting me because he’s got nothing else to do.”

Remembering how angry you were when your brother got himself into trouble and upset your mum, Jungkook asked with a small smirk on his lips, “and you had nothing to do with the Xbox?”

You shook your head. “I don’t believe it’s an appropriate punishment to withhold things from your children. I think it makes them withdraw from their parents, especially when they’re seventeen like Kai. And it makes them annoy their siblings instead,” you paused. Then shrugged. “But I’m not a parent, so easy for me to say.”

Dignified, Jungkook cleared his throat.

“You’ve contributed greatly to raising your brother,” he said in a voice full of contempt for your family’s general tendency to use the nine-year age difference between you and your brother as an excuse to have you babysit for free.

Although your heartbeat increased at the sound of his confidence—and his almost reflexive habit of defending you from yourself—your outward appearance remained composed. It was easy to appear collected when you weren’t looking at him and he felt so far away.

“And look at him now,” you said, an ironic smile on your face. “A mess.”

Jungkook snickered. “He’s really not that bad.”

Sighing again, you ran a hand through your hair and felt your fingers get caught in the last strand, only adding to your frustration with your brother.

“Sure. He’s a good kid,” you said, looking up at Jungkook. “But he tries too hard.”

Jungkook saw the parallel, he felt it. You might as well have said that about him.

At last, it seemed like the time had come to address the real reason he’d come to your room. He knew that this casual chit-chat was only temporary anyway. But if he wasn’t careful, it would be the last time the two of you spoke to each other with such ease, such familiarity.

He cleared his throat and said, “this might be the hardest conversation we have.”

He didn’t need to elaborate, you understood. And still, you thought about his words for a moment and decided to disagree.

“Or the easiest,” you said. “I mean, everything important that we could have said, we’ve pretty much said already.”

He blinked, surprised at first. Then dizzy.

There were several things he wanted to say to you, but he expected to listen to you first. He knew you wouldn’t initiate a conversation about your feelings, but he’d hoped this was different, especially considering all that you’d said to each other on the street.

It wasn’t different. You sat across from him on the bed and you looked a little uncomfortable, but not particularly confounded.

He’d expected to find you grappling with questions, armoured with rightful accusations, but you appeared settled.

Maybe it’s because it’s been four years, he realised suddenly. He hadn’t been there to watch you build your defences. He hadn’t seen your walls grow.

He worried, suddenly, that nothing he’d say would mean anything to you. He worried that the only reason you let him into your room was to deliver the finishing blow—to tell him that you were done one more time.

He switched the arm he was leaning against the bed with; his right arm was slowly going numb. Actually, so was his left, and, if he was completely honest, his whole body felt a bit like it was floating away from him, but he tried to focus on the moment.

“Uh, w-we haven’t said everything,” he said.

You looked at him. “What else is there?”

“Two things.”

Inhaling sharply, you turned away. You did not really want to continue the discussion you’d had by the canal. In fact, you didn’t think there was anything to continue at all.

You’d walked away as soon as you realised that you’d come face-to-face with your break-up. And this was it. You’ve found the reason why this could never work. Why you and him together could never work. And it was truly simple: it’s because it hadn’t worked before. You already knew it, but you enjoyed the leisure of pretending that you didn’t.

All that you two had to do now, in your opinion, was reach a formal agreement that this would be it. You’ve explored each other’s boundaries enough during this tour. The time has come to stop. To go back to your normal lives, your regular jobs and duties.

However, now that he was here, there was hesitation behind your closed eyes. You had learned that the two of you had different ideas about why you broke up. And you’d spent four years boiling in them, convincing yourselves you’ve moved on from them, then facing them head-on when you really looked at each other again.

Perhaps there were a few more things you had to talk about, after all, before you could truly put this behind you.

Finally, you nodded your head once and told him, “okay. What’s the first thing?”

“The first thing,” he started, “is that I'm sorry.”

It was well known that “sorry” wasn’t always a heavy word. People threw it around like a pebble and watched it bounce off the surface of the water, rarely ever intending for it to sink, to reach the depths not visible to the naked eye. Jungkook had been one of those people many times in his life.

But the word he used here felt different.

It carried a weight that forced him to lower his head as he said it. As if all his thoughts had been poured into this sentence – this fateful “I’m sorry” – and the heaviness of it was difficult to bear. As if he’d assigned different meanings to each “sorry” in his head, and all these little pieces suddenly added up to one big word that took up the whole room.

“For not realising what I was doing back then,” he said, dissecting the apology, “and what it meant for our relationship.”

He figured there wasn’t much that you could say that would make it easier for him to breathe – the conversation by the canal, the bet, the apology, all of it was too significant to leave much room for oxygen in his lungs.

But you said, “I forgive you.”

And it felt a lot like you were performing emergency resuscitation and successfully maintaining his brain function.

He wasn’t certain if you’d said that because it was the right thing to say, or because you’d meant it. If it was the former, Jungkook would have rather suffocated.

“You do?” he asked, unsure if he was prepared for your explanation.

“Yeah,” you said. “I didn’t know that you weren’t—that you didn’t realise why—why we broke up the way we did. And it sucks that you didn’t, but…”

You faltered here and Jungkook was keenly aware how you’d said it sucks, but you’d really meant it hurt me. It hurt that he’d been dismissive, negligent, and heedless – and had the audacity not to realise it.

He closed his eyes while you finished, “it sucks more to know that, all this time, you thought I’d just walked away for no good reason.”

An apology was on the tip of your tongue, he could sense it. Although you had many reasons to be angry with him for being so impossibly stupid, you also felt guilty because all this time, he had thought you woke up one morning and suddenly decided you didn’t want to be with him anymore. Like it was your fault that he didn’t realise he’d been taking you for granted every day for months before you broke up.

You should have been angry with him. Instead, you thought you were responsible for not explaining your reasoning properly before you left.

He couldn’t even begin to describe the ache in his chest. He wanted you so much, but more and more he realised that he didn’t deserve you.

“I didn’t try to stop you,” he said before you could say anything else, because this was another element of his initial apology. One more thing he had to be sorry for.

You shrugged with one shoulder. Over the years, you’d come up with several reasons why he never fought for your relationship, not even considering that he might have assumed you had fallen out of love with him. At the end of every day, you simply thought he didn’t care anymore.

“I thought you were okay with it,” you said. “When I told you we were over, you just stood there. You didn’t ask why and I didn’t... answer.”

“I wasn’t okay with it,” he replied. “But I didn’t think there was anything I could do.”

With a thoughtful nod, you agreed, “there probably wasn’t.”

“Yeah, but I felt that way because I assumed that you—you didn’t want to be with me. That you didn’t care about me anymore. And you, uh,” he stopped here and waited for a long minute. Finally, he inhaled deeply. “You thought the opposite.”

You probably should have shouted at each other as you discussed this, you thought abruptly. That would have been appropriate. Maybe even healthy, all things considered.

But then, perhaps the realisation that you both had different views on why you broke up was precisely the thing that softened the impact. His hurt because you’d left him without an explanation, and your anger because he made you do it—they both took up outstanding amounts of space in your chests. They weighed you down. And they almost balanced each other out.

Perhaps you weren’t ready to shout just yet. Or not anymore.

Perhaps you’d left most of the shouting in the past four years ago. Now you were finally on the verge of closure.

That was the point, after all: the two of you boasted—really, there was no other word for it, you were both proud of it—that you’d never spoken to anyone about the details of your relationship.

That could have been admirable, of course, this utter devotion to each other and no one else. Except that, you didn’t talk about your relationship with each other, either.

“Do you think this is our own fault?” you asked. “We were good at talking about everything except… well, us.”

“I know,” Jungkook was quick to agree. You had both been like this from the very beginning—that’s likely why he was never fully aware of his behaviour. You’d always argued, but never about the things that really mattered. “I nearly threw up before I asked you to be my girlfriend.”

You did a double take, your mind racing to supply you with a memory that matched his words, but coming up short.

You squinted at him. “Did you actually ask?”

He opened his mouth to respond, but let it hang there, no words coming out for a good minute.

“You don't remember?!” he accused, his voice so high-pitched that it could almost shatter glass.

“I remember going on at least five dates before someone called you,” you explained, “and I heard you say into your phone, ‘sorry, I’m with my girlfriend.’ And that’s when I assumed that, huh. I guess I’m your girlfriend then.”

Jungkook could remember this exact moment. It was Sid who had called him because the two of them were working for Sid’s grandfather fixing his Camaro at the time. Jungkook had needed the money, while Sid simply enjoyed the ‘69 classic car.

The memory sent a shiver down his spine because he recalled turning Sid down. He had prioritised you over everything back then. What had happened to him later?

Regardless – in Jungkook’s mind, the timeline of your relationship was different.

“I vividly remember asking you on our second date,” he said.

You furrowed your eyebrows as you attempted to remember the very beginning of your relationship.

Your first date was the traditional movie and dinner—although it turned into a movie and the rain when you got stuck in the park. You recalled the whole day with near-perfect clarity.

Your second date was a week later, at the carnival in town. It took you three hours to get back to your dorms, because the event was held across the forest that separated the university campus from a small town nearby. Jungkook had insisted that you could walk home, he had claimed to know the way. And then he proceeded to get you lost within a few seconds of entering the forest.

All you could remember him asking you back then, was, ‘I know where I’m going, so trust me, okay?’ and that certainly did not include any terms that specified your relationship status.

Confused if you were remembering this wrong, you asked, “when we got lost on our way home from the carnival?”

“Before that!” he was even louder now, both of his hands in the air as he frantically explained, “on the Ferris wheel! I can’t believe you don’t remember!”

“On the Ferris—Jungkook, you had motion sickness the whole time we were on it,” you reminded him.

“I wasn’t sick,” he argued. “I was nervous.”

You narrowed your eyes at him. “All you said to me during that entire ride was ‘please’ when we were at the very top.”

“That was me asking!”

“That was—” You laughed in surprise before you could finish the sentence. “Okay, well, you can see why I wouldn’t remember that, considering you didn’t use a lot of words to explain what you meant. I thought you were asking me to end the ride. Not that I could have ended it, but—”

“You said yes, though.”

You didn’t think you heard him right, his tone noticeably lower compared to the agitated screaming before. “Hm?”

“When I said, ‘please?’,” he spoke, “you said, ‘yes.’”

You watched him, considering it.

“I think I was asking,” you said and demonstrated, “yes?”

“No. You made a statement,” he disagreed, showing you, “yes.”

You pursed your lips, choosing to quit before this escalated into an argument.

“Alright, fine,” you said. “Maybe I read your mind, then.”

He scoffed, turning away. “And forgot about it…”

Nevermind taking the high road.

“Well, I didn't think it meant anything,” you argued, “you were—”

“I had a different plan. I was going to fully embrace The Notebook and dangle from someone else’s seat to ask you,” Jungkook said, “but for that to work, you would’ve had to go on the ride with someone else. And at that point, I couldn’t let you sit in that cabin with someone who wasn’t me.”

You could feel your cheeks stretching as an involuntary smile spread across your lips.

“That’s a little crazy,” you said gently.

“Please,” he replied, lowering himself on your bed until he was lying on his back. “It’s just crazy. I went on a binge-watching session of romantic films before our first few dates. I did my research.”

You knew him too well not to point out, “was it really only for research?”

“Alright, after the first few, I started to really enjoy them,” he admitted, earning a knowing nod from you. He smiled in response and continued, “but then I got to know you better, and I figured that if I serenaded you like Heath Ledger did in 10 Things I Hate About You, you’d break up with me immediately.”

Your laughter sounded so sincere and calming that Jungkook felt his smile widen as he turned his head to look at you from where he was lying on your bed.

“So I became a singer instead,” he said, encouraged by the lightness in your laugh. “You can’t break up with me if singing for you is my job.”

Your stomach performed an intricate Loop-the-Loop and then dropped, seemingly down ten floors, all the way to the lobby of the hotel.

Desperate, you tried, “you’re not—it’s not—”

Noticing you were about to downplay his words—either because you didn’t think he meant it, or because you didn’t feel comfortable knowing that he did—Jungkook changed the topic instead.

“Were you angry at me?” he asked. “For not chasing you after you left that time?”

Struggling to collect the remains of your thoughts, you spoke very slowly, “I... I was angry that you didn’t put in any effort while we were still together. After that, I thought you didn’t care anymore.”

“I did,” he said. Then, realising, he corrected himself, “I do. And I didn’t want to make the same mistake again today.”

Hesitantly, you asked, “how do you mean? Because I left today?”

He nodded. “I'm not going to wait another four years before we talk about us.”

“Jungkook...” you said, but the sound of his name on your lips caused your thoughts to jumble once more. Your words stuck to your throat as your heart threw itself against the walls of your chest. You hoped to divert the topic, “y-you said there were two things. What—what’s the second thing?”

“The second thing is that I love you,” he said in one quick breath. “I took everything we had for granted, and I’m sorry. But the truth is that even then I was—I-I’d never stopped loving you.”

A sense of déjà vu clouded your mind, while the rest of your body reacted as if this was the first time you’d heard him say this. As if the four years you hadn’t been together were long enough to start a new lifetime, and now you’ve met again, reincarnated into different people – Jungkook, the vocalist of a rock band, and you, the manager.

But, buried deep in your subconscious, locked away in a box that your brain dared not touch even in a dreaming state, was the memory of the first time he’d said these words to you.

It was spring. You’d been together for about five or six months at that point, and you’d skipped class together to go to the same park where you’d had your first date. You’d spent the whole day walking around hand-in-hand, reminiscing about the past, dreaming of the future, taking pictures of the freshly bloomed cherry blossoms, and picking up the pale pink leaves from the grass to throw them at each other.

During the car ride back home, you were so exhausted that you could hardly keep your eyes open. The two of you had been running around so much—his energy was infectious, you’d both acted like Golden Retrievers set loose—that your legs felt wobbly and unsteady.

After a few more minutes, you had lost the battle against yourself and settled more comfortably into the passenger seat, closing your eyes. Your mind was already beginning to fill with the bliss of sleep when Jungkook stopped the car at a red light.

He glanced at you, seemingly asleep on the seat beside him, and leaned in to press his lips to your forehead. When he pulled back, he noticed a pale cherry blossom in your hair and a soft smile on your lips.

It was nothing more than a whisper—“I love you so much”—that slipped from his lips because he thought you were asleep. Nothing more than an overwhelmed confession as his heart drowned in his feelings.

But, to this day, nothing has ever come close to making your heart beat nearly as fast as it had in that car when the light turned green and he drove back to your dorm, still thinking you were asleep. That first confession of love remained a secret between you, him, and the stray cherry blossom nestled in your hair.

Slowly, you opened your eyes as the memory tugged at each and every cell of your skin, bringing goosebumps to the surface. You looked around the hotel room before you dared to look at him again.

Contrary to what Jungkook believed, you didn’t appear collected because you were done. Or because you didn’t want to fight with yourself about wanting him anymore.

It was because you were tired of still wanting him so much in spite of everything.

You were tired of forcing yourself to let go. To move on. To be rational and responsible.

Tired of feeling happy about things that were probably inappropriate.

Tired of finding those things inappropriate.

But rationally, you knew that you had to leave this behind and return to your normal lives after this, regardless of what you wanted.

It’d be much harder—to an infinite extent—because this wasn’t how you’d imagined this conversation going.

Quietly, you broke the silence, “I’m sorry, too.”

“Why?” he asked, sitting up on the bed.

“We can’t...” the words trailed off before you could catch up. You tried again, “I can’t—we can't do this.”

He observed the battle behind your eyes and then spoke, very softly, almost inaudibly, “we’re not doing anything wrong.”

“We’re—"

“We’re the ones who put meaning to things,” he continued. Not to contradict you, but to reassure you. “If we say it doesn't mean anything, then it doesn't.”

You shook your head with a sad smile, the situation vaguely familiar.

“It’s never that simple,” you said. “There’s so much more than just you and me to consider.”

“It is simple,” he insisted. Then, just like back in your bunk on the tour bus, he asked, “do you want me to leave?”

Just like back then, you answered without hesitation, “no.”

“Then this can have as much or as little meaning as you want it to. I don’t give a fuck,” he said. “I’m yours. You are all I’m considering. And I’m staying.”

In less than a second, the determination in his voice made you realise that rational didn’t always mean reasonable.

Rationally, you knew you should have drawn the line. You should have left or told him to leave. Should have distanced yourself from him for the sake of your heart. Your job. For the sake of the atmosphere backstage.

You were aware of all the damage this could do. You were aware of the risk. Of the questions. Of the pain.

You were aware that you were having the very conversation that you’d stopped him from pursuing a few hours ago on the street. But your response to him was vastly different now.

Really, the situation felt different, too.

The second thing is that I love you.

I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you—

You couldn’t imagine yourself leaving.

There was no place in the whole world that you would have rather been in right now. And no one else you would have wanted to share that place with.

It felt reasonable to stay. And wish for him to stay, too.

Jungkook had to scoot closer on the bed to reduce the distance between you two, and as soon as he did, he leaned in right away. He’d hesitated before, got scared, panicked and changed his mind. Tonight, he would do nothing of the sort.

His lips touched yours before you could formulate a single doubt and his kiss effectively silenced all the noises and echoes in your head.

Truthfully, he knew that there was a third thing he didn’t tell you, but when you kissed him back, less tentatively than the first time on the bus, he couldn’t imagine ever saying anything to you again. Speaking seemed like an immeasurable waste of time.

Instead, he pulled you closer, his lips locked on yours as one of his hands held the side of your face. His gentle fingertips contrasted with the coldness of his lip ring against your lips as he touched the skin of your cheek like he wasn’t sure, not even now, that it was really you he was holding. His other hand found its way around your waist and settled there—the gesture so intimate, so familiar.

He kissed you and it felt inevitable. Like everything you’d been doing up to this point was meant to lead you here – even the break-up four years ago.

As Jungkook felt your hands on his chest, careful and barely there, he mentally cursed himself for wearing this white shirt yet again—the fabric was too thick for him to properly feel you.

Still, he recognised the ghost of your touch as though he’d never been apart from you. As though you’d always stayed like this, locked in a desperate embrace in the tenth-floor room of a hotel in Amsterdam.

There were endless somethings bursting persistently in his chest as he tasted you, deepening the kiss by bringing his tongue over yours. Fireworks and flames and entire conflagrations all wreaked havoc on his heart.

This time, there were no promises of five minutes, and no curtains to separate you from everyone else. When you whimpered quietly, in response to him pulling you up until one of your legs was thrown over his and you were seated firmly on his thigh, he was the only one who heard it. The only one who felt your heavy breathing on his lips as he kissed you.

And if, by a lucky chance, there was any oxygen left in the room, neither of you needed it as your holds on each other grew tighter, hands grasping whatever materials they could reach and pulling—until he took your shirt off, until you took off his.

Every single one of your nerve endings was focused solely on him—his taste, his scent, his touch, his warmth, the roughness of his dark jeans underneath you, the softness of the skin on his chest. Your body instinctively drew closer, prompting him to clench his thigh as he wrapped his arms around you even more tightly.

His lips gently trailed kisses down your jawline and onto your neck, and it was as intoxicating as it was overwhelming. He remembered your body—how could he forget when it haunted his dreams almost every night?—but he yearned to create new memories, to trace the lines of your figure that he’d memorised and bring them to life in a new and different way.

You helped his eager hands find the edge of your sports bra and had to briefly pull away from him to slide it over your head. He pulled you back to him as soon as you did, needing to get lost in your touch, to feel your skin against his.

Your hotel room was filled with so much electricity, the two of you could have lit all of Amsterdam up.

“There’s so much I want to say to you. So much I have to say,” he breathed against your lips while his hands caressed your exposed sides, tracing the familiar maps on your skin.

You pulled him closer by gripping the back of his neck and exhaled, “show me instead.”

The meaningfulness, or rather, meaninglessness, of the moment seemed secondary. You wouldn’t analyse what this symbolised or where you stood.

Instead, you’d analyse how kissing him—touching him, feeling his skin, hearing his breathing—felt good. How it felt right. Like you’d been lying to yourself by doing everything else but this.

Sitting on his lap as he held you firmly in his arms—essentially trapping you in his grip, in his scent, in him—you could feel the rest of the world fade away into the recesses of your mind that you didn’t consider important at this given point.

Focusing on the feeling of his tongue against yours and the firmness underneath you, you allowed the scorching heat of the moment to take control of your movements as you instinctively moved your hips against his and forced him to suck in a shaky breath.

You undid the buckle of his belt and he had to pull back just a little, breaking the kiss. His head was spinning, overwhelmed by your closeness and the rapid beating of his heart. It wasn’t the first time you had been this close, but it had been so long, and he’d wanted this so much, that it felt like he’d never done this before.

Noticing your trembling hands, he helped you with his belt by loosening his grip on your waist. As soon as your fingers reached the zipper of his pants, he grabbed your forearms—successfully halting your progress in ridding him of his jeans—and swiftly flipped you over onto your back on the bed.

Your eyes met for a split second as he hovered over you, silently exchanging a conversation that neither of you dared to voice.

He leaned in to kiss you again and allowed you to get back to the previous task. Kissing him back, you finally managed to lower his jeans to his knees, and the simple feeling of your touch on the back of his thighs nearly made him see stars. Leaning his forehead against yours, he squeezed his eyes shut and bit his lip to regain his composure.

He briefly sat up to kick off his jeans—as quickly as he could, because the room temperature fell a hundred degrees when he wasn’t touching you—and you took a moment to trace the patterns of ink on his arm with your eyes.

You were with him when he got his first tattoo.

He acted tough in the tattoo parlour, but once the artist took you both down to the basement, all of his bravery faded. It was rather chilly down there—Jungkook was pouting when he took his jacket off, revealing his shivering skin—and he’d chosen his knuckles as a place for his first tattoo. It was going to hurt.

He knew that, in theory. But the way he squeezed your hand and bit his lip when the needle pierced his skin for the first time still surprised you both. You weren’t sure who was in more pain by the end of the session—him, from the fresh ink on his hand, or you, from how hard he’d been squeezing your hand.

Now, he had a full sleeve. And you felt a pang of pain in your chest, because there were so many tattoos that you hadn’t seen him get.

You hadn’t been there when the needle pierced his skin again and again. You hadn’t seen the way he closed his eyes, clenched his jaw, and placed a hand on your knee—for support, for reassurance, for all-consuming love.

You hadn’t helped him apply lotion on the fresh ink, hadn’t teased him for being a baby, hadn’t been shut up with a kiss. You hadn’t traced the intricate lines on his skin with the tips of your fingers—careful, gentle, loving.

You hadn’t been there for four years.

But you were here now.

Just as your gaze reached his shoulder, your eyes locked on the patterns you’d never touched, Jungkook turned to you and caught you staring. The dazed look in your eyes before he had even done anything affected him in more ways than he could count.

With a wide, shameless grin and a raised eyebrow, he leaned into you again. You noticed right away that he was about to say something that would surely ruin the moment, but you pressed a hand to his chest, stopping him before he could.

“Don’t,” you warned. There was humour and light and excitement in your eyes.

Chuckling as if you’d read his mind, he pressed a kiss to your lips and mumbled, “wasn’t going to say anything.”

“Liar,” you exhaled against his mouth as he quickly slid your biker shorts and panties down your hips, your back barely leaving the bed.

“Honest,” he countered in a soft whisper, his lips hovering over your neck as his hands returned to your waist and he aligned your hips with his. “I have better things on my mind.”

It was hard to determine which one of you was to blame for ending this unnecessary bickering by inhaling too sharply – you, who reached the edge of his boxers and pulled them down, removing the last layer of clothing between you; or him, who gently caressed your thighs, drawing deliberately slow, teasing circles that inched closer to your core.

He managed to kick off his boxers without letting go of you—which was a talent that was difficult to advertise, but a talent nonetheless—and kissed you deeply. One of his fingers slid over your thighs and traced over your folds, causing your body to twitch in anticipation as you gripped his forearms for support.

His touch felt foreign and familiar at the same time – he knew how to find every single one of your nerve endings, but your body seemed to have forgotten that he knew.

It was almost frightening how he sensed exactly how to touch you to elicit a response—the pillows of his fingers effortlessly reached the bundle of nerves on your clit at just the right time to make your back arch off the bed involuntarily, seeking more friction. Your breathing grew louder every time he applied more pressure to his touch.

It really didn’t feel fair at all—the way he appeared to know your body better than you did, even after all these years.

A frustrated whimper escaped your lips when he added another finger, picking up the pace. He alternated between gentle rubs and teasing caresses, and his touch made your head spin, but you wanted more of him. All of him.

He only inserted a finger for a fraction of a second before lightly brushing it over your folds—the motion so sweet and then suddenly not enough. Your nails were about to draw blood from how tight you were gripping his arms.

“Don’t tease,” you exhaled, more a plea than a command. “Not now.”

There was a hint of promise here, and Jungkook smiled before nodding. He kissed your lips, but instead of pulling away, he increased his pace—toying with your clit with just enough pressure and at just the right angle that you could have cried out if you hadn’t been biting your lip so hard.

“Fuck,” was all you could respond with as your eyes rolled back from the intense sensation. “Jungkook—”

This time his name was encouraging. It was begging. It made him groan as he leaned in, already almost painfully hard as he rubbed your clit, spreading your wetness with his fingers.

“Hmm.” He touched your neck with his lips in a sloppy, wet kiss that sent shivers down your spine. “You look so beautiful.”

“Fuck,” you repeated, the relentless ministrations of his fingers rendering you incapable of a more coherent sentence. “Fuck.”

And just when you felt the pressure in your stomach building, he pulled away abruptly.

The loss of contact made you exhale with enough agitation for it to resemble a whine. This earned you a smirk from him as he pulled back slightly, convinced he was just doing what you’d asked because he did indeed stop teasing.

To be fair, it was for his benefit, too. Your body, your warmth, your heavy breaths—he knew it all teased him more than he could ever tease you.

Struggling to maintain his composure, he bit his lip and reached for his length, giving it a few languid strokes.

The first glimpses of concern started to creep in when he realised he had no protection, but he saw you nod at the pile of suitcases by your bed. Confused initially, he rolled off of you and approached what appeared to be a welcome basket on top of the pile.

“Don’t tell me…” he mumbled in disbelief as he picked up the wicker basket—decorated with an appropriate white bow.

“Yeah,” you confirmed his thoughts and sure enough, among complimentary bottles of shampoo and tubes of toothpaste, he found a box of condoms.

Under different circumstances, he would have embraced his inner teenager and dropped everything to giggle at this, but he tried to stay composed. That is, until he looked at you and saw that you were biting your lip in an obvious attempt to hold back laughter.

“Well, this is quite convenient,” he remarked, encouraged by your amusement, as he climbed back on the bed. “Almost meant to be, no?”

“Don’t spoil the moment,” you warned, pressing your lips together to conceal your smile. “Just hurry.”

“Say that again for me?” he teased. “I love it when you beg.”

Undeterred by the punch on his shoulder that he received in response, Jungkook laughed and ripped the bag open. He unrolled the condom onto his length with relative ease despite the slight shake in his hands.

You reached out to help him, and he realised he might actually pass out when he felt you touch him. The tips of your fingers were on the tip of his length as he brought it closer to your entrance.

He shook his head and warned breathlessly, all of his previous confidence gone, “I’m not—not going to last long.”

He could tell as much even before he entered you, but after you nodded—giving him voiceless permission—and, slowly, almost agonisingly, he slid inside, he realised he may have miscalculated.

He might not last at all.

Lowering his head as he paused, not even halfway in, he bit his lip in concentration and closed his eyes. He couldn’t get himself together when you looked like that under him—almost too lost in the feeling of him, in the pleasant stretch, in the way you couldn’t help but clench around him as your walls anticipated fitting all of him in.

“Fuck,” he exhaled shakily as you tightened around him. He really needed to get a grip. More sternly, he repeated, “fuck,” and, with a more forceful thrust of his hips, he fully bottomed out.

You threw your head back at the sudden motion, needing a second to adjust to the stretch. This was helped greatly by one of his hands as he caressed your hips, your waist, your breasts while he gave you as much time as you needed. Hė toyed with your nipple between his fingers and the gentle touch and the utmost admiration in his dark eyes sent sparks straight to your core.

After you quietly urged him to move, it still took him a whole minute before he felt confident enough to pull almost all the way out and then push back in, testing both of your limits. He looked at you—because he couldn’t not look at you underneath him, not even if it meant he’d lose himself right away—and the expression on your face was so dreamy that he didn’t even realise he shuddered in exhilaration.

Your head was still thrown back as you held your lower lip in a tight grip between your teeth. When you slowly opened your eyes, your gaze met his right away. And there was barely anything—fuck it, there was nothing—that he could have done to prepare for it.

He thought he may as well have died then and there because nothing in his life would ever compare to the colour of your eyes when you looked at him.

Swallowing the groan in the back of his throat, he leaned in to press his lips to yours as he began to move. It was slow at first, then his hips gradually gained more speed as he felt your warm walls pulling him in. Your fingers found their way to his hair, getting tangled in the dark strands as his hips pressed into yours harder—not just faster, but with more force, too, each brush of his length igniting a new fire inside of you.

He made it impossible for you to catch your breath as he kissed you with as much fervour as before, not once slowing down the pace of his hips. Everything he did was in response to you—the way you arched your back, your whimpers in between the messy, open-mouthed kisses, the way you pulled his hair, the way you held onto his shoulders.

He knew that if he lost concentration, he’d unravel immediately. It’s been so long, too long. He’s wasted far too many nights in foreign beds, chasing highs that had always felt forced and artificial. He wasn’t prepared for the real thing. He wasn’t prepared for you.

“Fuck. I’d missed you, my love,” he whispered hazily between kisses, each word accompanied by a thrust of his hips, “so fucking much.”

You felt shivers run down your spine again. If you could have formed a sentence—let alone voiced it—you would have reciprocated.

You would have told him that you missed him too. And you would have told him how much it scared you, the way this feeling was so intense that you seemed to disregard everything else.

But you couldn’t focus.

His length stroked your walls with an exemplary balance of force and tenderness. His tongue was in your mouth, the kiss hot, heavy, messy. His hands were all over your skin, warm, eager, relentless.

He filled your head with stars.

You could not speak, you could not say anything that wasn’t a breathless whisper of his name every time he pulled away to give you both a chance to inhale.

He understood you without words, however. And the response you had to him was about to tip him over the edge. His movements became too fast to be precise, his thrusts grew sloppy, his breathing got heavier, his groans louder.

The knot in your stomach formed much faster than you would have liked. You wanted this to last longer, but all of it felt reckless—dangerous and outrageous—and so good—too­ good—that you broke the kiss, a strangled cry of his name passing your lips as a warning that you were close.

“Yeah?” he whispered, kissing your jaw as he pressed his thumb on your clit. The rubbing motion matched the speed of his hips and the intensified pleasure caught you so unexpectedly that you could no longer control how loud you were.

Your heavy breaths mixed with curses and broken fragments of his name—he knew these sounds would echo around his mind for every waking moment—as your back arched off the bed and into him.

And when he heard you cry out, when he felt your grip on his arms tighten as your body jerked forwards, your hips meeting his, then lowering again in uncontrollable muscle spasms, when he felt your walls clench around him so much that they nearly stopped his movements, he almost whined, sensing his own high, brought on by the feeling of yours.

There were curses spilling from your lips as you came and you held onto him so tightly that he knew he’d have bruises on his arms tomorrow morning. Already, he couldn’t wait to look at them. He couldn’t wait to do this again.

His hips drove into yours—sloppily, accompanied by loud sounds of skin slapping on skin—until he fell over the edge, groaning loudly as he spilled himself into the condom. His body twitched as he pushed into you—one final stroke of your soft, sensitive walls—then he stilled completely.

His face was inches from yours, and you were the one who reached out to connect your lips, turning his groan into a dangerous whimper. Your kiss burned through him like electricity and, impossibly, seemed to prolong his climax.

He kissed you back like it was the first time, still powerless from his high, still feeling like he was floating, unable to come down, to pull out, to stop kissing you.

Breathless, you whined against his mouth and felt him stir inside of you, sparking a sudden new fire in your stomach before the previous one could fully go out.

He wanted you, needed you still—maybe he’d never stop. But it was the way you responded to him, the way he felt you need him as much as he needed you, that made him growl into the kiss as his hands reached for the parts of you that he'd touched hundreds of times tonight already.

It was almost desperate, the way you were still clinging to one another—like you’d never touched each other before and never would again.

Finally, you pulled away to inhale. And to, hopefully, recover.

“Fuck,” Jungkook whispered, summarising all that you were about to say.

You both chuckled, giddy, excited, almost euphoric.

He rested his forehead against yours and pressed another soft kiss to your lips before slowly pulling out, and stepping back to discard the condom.

In no more than three seconds, he was back on the bed next to you, pulling you to his side and kissing you once more.

It was three seconds then, he decided, that he could survive away from you.

For a good minute after that, the two of you just watched each other, your chests rising and falling as your bodies tried to fathom something that your minds failed to grasp.

Suddenly, you shook your head.

“What?” he asked. His lips were stretched into what felt like a permanent smile.

“Nothing, I just… it would be very difficult to explain where we were if someone noticed us missing,” you said—your words humorous, but the meaning behind them serious.

Even though you smiled as you spoke, Jungkook swallowed and nodded, solemn all of a sudden.

“I know,” he said. “And I don’t care if anyone knows. I only care that we do.”

You ran your tongue over your swollen lips, preparing to say something that he knew he wouldn’t like. But he was paralysed as he watched you. He swore your lips were the colour of his dreams, and he had to clench his jaw so he wouldn’t lean over and kiss you again.

He forced himself to roll onto his back and spoke up before you could, making sure his voice was as nonchalant as possible, given the hurricane inside his chest, “can we—can we not talk about that right now? Can I just stay here instead?”

You looked at him—which was incredibly easy when he wasn’t looking back at you—and forgot, for a moment, that you had to reply.

He looked almost ethereal like this, with his head resting on the pillows next to you, his hair tousled, stray curls sticking to the droplets of sweat on his forehead, his lips pursed slightly as he stared ahead. A part of you wished to take a picture, to hold onto this moment forever. But a different part of you didn’t want anyone else to witness him like this, not even the lens of your phone camera.

He suddenly turned his head to look at you and you blinked, averting your eyes as you remembered that you hadn’t spoken.

“Hmm. Yes,” you said, the word scratchy as it caught in your dry throat. You cleared it and tried again, “okay.”

Jungkook hummed somehow ambiguously and looked away.

“What?” you asked, confused by the look on his face.

“I thought you’d still tell me to leave,” he admitted.

You sighed. “You should. But I want you to stay. I’m fine with doing what I want tonight, however stupid that might turn out to be.”

He ignored the doubt in your voice—he was getting good at that—and looked at you again. He knew you probably couldn’t even begin to imagine the sort of fire your words ignited inside of him, and just how far the sparks travelled on his skin.

“Then I hope you know,” he said, “that I’m fine with only getting ten minutes of sleep tonight.”

Quietly, you replied, “I think I’m fine, too.”

“Yeah?” he asked, briskly turning to his side and propping himself up on his elbow with renewed excitement.

His abrupt jump made you chuckle despite your best attempts to remain serious, and his grin widened as he brought his hand to the side of your face and leaned in to kiss you once more. Then, twice more. Then three more times—in perpetuity, he hoped.

He knew that he was blessed to have experienced a lot of happiness in his life. But nothing came close to the feeling of your lips on his as the two of you played around in your hotel bed in Amsterdam, two nights before his band’s inaugural performance in The Netherlands during their first European tour.

This was a dream, it had to be.

And he was determined to do everything to make sure he never woke up from it.

chapter title credits: sleep token, “like that”

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sleepwalking ● 10 | jjk

pairing: jungkook x fem!reader

summary: due to unfortunate circumstances, you ended up managing your ex-boyfriend’s band. you thought you’ve both made peace with it, but suddenly he’s very eager to prove to you that first love never dies.

genre: rockstar!jungkook / exes to lovers

warnings: explicit language, mentions of blood (just a nosebleed friends), suggestive themes, lovesick characters, SLOW BURN

words: 8k

read from the beginning ○ masterlist

chapter 10 ► don’t try to fight the storm, you’ll tumble overboard, tides will bring me back to you

That night, Jungkook realised he had a new pre-concert tradition: tossing and turning in his bunk on the tour bus.

And it wasn’t the upcoming performance that was keeping him awake. It was the fact that he’d almost kissed you not even two hours ago, and now you were lying metres away from him in your own bunk.

He thought he was insane, the way he could identify your breathing. Although to be fair, that was mostly because Hoseok sighed and moved his limbs back and forth, Taehyung and Luna stayed up whispering into all kinds of hours of the night, and Yoongi just plain snored (despite always claiming otherwise) – you were easy enough for him to differentiate.

But he couldn’t tell if you were asleep or not.

You weren’t—obviously—but, unlike him, you forced yourself not to focus on how close he was. Forced yourself not to hear the soft creaking that was caused by him, evidently still awake, but trying not to be.

It was almost ironic how aware you were of each other, how your minds were thinking the same thing, but your bodies were resisting it.

A part of you wanted to get up. Wanted to walk up to him and ask point-blank, “what the fuck was that?”. But you stayed still, your fists clenched, and eyes stubbornly squeezed shut.

Maybe you didn’t ask because you didn’t know what you expected to hear in response.

Similarly, Jungkook tortured himself with the possibility of simply explaining himself to you. Although he wasn’t sure what he would say. Why didn't he kiss you? Would it really have been so terrible?

But it would have. He knew that. He found himself unable to kiss you because he knew his friends would assume he’d done it to win the bet.

He exhaled deeply and Hoseok—in his bunk, right in front of Jungkook—turned to his other side and stretched his leg out, dangling it over the edge of the bed.

Maybe he should just tell his friends that the bet was off. And if they didn’t agree, maybe he should kick them off the tour. They’d go home. He probably wouldn’t see them again.

But then, would he have anything left?

As his eyes drifted to your bunk again, he swallowed and tossed away the pillow from under his head, resting on the bare mattress instead. He hoped he could at least get a few minutes of sleep.

In the morning, he’d try to focus on other things. It might not work for very long, but he could at least try. He could start by showing the lyrics he’d been working on to Namjoon.

After finishing your phone call with the label executives in Rated Riot’s dressing room during the band’s soundcheck before the Oslo show (Jett Records were thrilled now that the tour was nearly sold out), you were surprised when you turned around and saw Yoongi.

“What are you doing here?” you asked, checking the time on your phone. “Didn’t the soundcheck—”

“Came for a bottle of water, but overheard your call,” he explained, lifting the bottle in his hand. “Everything okay?”

“Everything’s perfect, actually,” you replied, looking down to slip your phone into your pocket. “I was on the phone with a few execs.”

When you looked up, Yoongi had a very specific comment about that.

“You’re bleeding,” he said.

“I’m—oh.” You felt it immediately after his words registered—a thick, uncomfortable warmth under your nose. You raised your hand and instinctively threw your head back. “Oh, shit.”

Yoongi jumped to grab the box of tissues off the table. He ripped open the package and handed you one.

“Here.” He lead you to the couch at the back of the room. “I’ve heard you’re not supposed to tilt your head back when you—sit down.”

You wiped your philtrum and pressed the tissue tightly to your nose to stop the bleeding.

“You heard right. It’s a reflex,” you said, allowing him to help you lower yourself on the couch. “I’m fine, though, it’s—I used to get nosebleeds all the time in school. It’s nothing.”

He still looked worried as he sat down next to you.

“I think you’re overworking yourself,” he said. “Are you sleeping?”

The question you’d asked every member of Rated Riot almost every day made you snort.

“I’m sleeping, Yoongi,” you said. “Don’t worry about me.”

“You were saying that someone from the label called you? Everything alright?”

“Mmhmm.” You nodded and immediately froze as you realised that moving your head wasn’t good for the bleeding. “They’re very pleased. I’m afraid you’ll only be able to rest for a few weeks once the tour wraps up. They want a new record as soon as you’re home.”

“That’s fine,” he said, waving a hand to dismiss your concern. “We’re musicians, it’s what we do.”

“You’ve been working without breaks, though. I’m a little worried.”

“Said our manager, while literally having a nosebleed.”

You looked away and insisted, dignified, “I’m fine.”

“So are we,” he said. “We’re used to this.”

You didn’t doubt it. The four of them lived and breathed music, so they obviously didn’t mind being constantly surrounded by it. Especially Yoongi. You knew he was in another band before, but he didn’t talk much about his time before Rated Riot. And you never asked, although you were certainly curious—not only as his friend, but as his manager, too. The vocalist from Yoongi’s old band had an extraordinary voice, she could have added a unique layer to Rated Riot’s new album. You wondered if he was still in touch with her.

“I thought we’d agreed on putting out EPs for now, though?” Yoongi said, distracting you from your thoughts.

“Yeah, uh, they’re fine with everything,” you said, pulling the tissue away. The bleeding had stopped, which was a relief because you didn’t have time to be stuck here for half an hour with a nose stuffed with tissues. “They’re simple people: the more shows you sell out, the more lenient they become.”

Yoongi chuckled and got up to bring you a fresh tissue. Then he returned to the table by the door and put his bottle down.

He appeared to be hesitating. You waited for a few seconds until he turned around, and you could see right away that he still had more to say, but it was taking him some time to find the words.

“There’s something else I wanted to mention to you,” he said after a minute, confirming your thoughts. “But maybe now isn’t the right—”

“I’m fine,” you repeated. His hesitation made you nervous. “What is it?”

“Did you know Jungkook was working on some music?” Yoongi asked. His expression resembled that of a disappointed teacher, and you were surprised to find yourself in the role of the student.

“Yeah, he, uh, mentioned it the other night,” you replied.

You got up to throw away the tissues and kept your gaze on the floor. The memory of last night and everything you and Jungkook had talked about, or, rather, not talked about, was still fresh in your mind. You were almost afraid that the night sky from yesterday would be reflected in your eyes when you looked up.

“Did he say what it was?” Yoongi asked.

Awkwardly, you replied, “not, um—not in detail.”

“Well, he played a quick demo to Namjoon and me earlier today. And it’s good stuff,” he said with a deep exhale that forced his shoulders to hunch and made him appear very small. His otherwise strong and commanding presence contradicted this appearance very much. He continued, “it’s just… it’s more Cigarettes After Sex than Architects. Not to mention, Reconnaissance. Or, you know, any other band that we usually get inspiration from.”

You nearly flinched at the mention of Reconnaissance and crossed your arms over your chest to play it off.

It made sense for Yoongi to be unsettled by this; he was responsible for a lot of Rated Riot’s music and was one of the main influencers of the band’s sound.

What didn’t make sense, however, was why he was talking to you about it.

“Did you tell him that?” you asked.

“I told him to keep working on it,” he said. “He said he recorded it on his phone as soon as he woke up because he came up with the lyrics very late at night. And we—well, I don’t want to discourage him.”

“Right,” you nodded, thinking that perhaps it was just Yoongi himself who needed encouragement, which was why he came to you. You tried to get him to elaborate, “so, you think he’s deviating from Rated Riot’s normal sound?”

“Not… deviating, exactly,” he said, reaching for something behind his neck—perhaps to adjust a bothersome label on his leather jacket, or maybe just to scratch an unreachable itch somewhere deep inside his skin. “We’re versatile, I like to think. Definitely not restricted to a certain genre and nothing else. But, well, if our new record’s going to be a heartbreak anthem, then I’m afraid all the effort we’re putting into making this tour a success could be in vain.”

You were surprised. But not about the fact that Jungkook was, apparently, working on songs about heartbreak (your mind decided to compartmentalise this information and deal with it later; maybe when you were alone in your bunk on the bus). No, you were surprised that Yoongi was so adamantly opposed to it.

“You have a few songs that are, on a certain level, about heartbreak,” you reminded him. “They didn’t do so bad.”

That was gentle. The songs were a success for a non-pop band that was just starting out. Even some mainstream radio stations picked up some songs, although they were never included in regular rotation. But that was understandable, and it was still good enough for the time being.

“Yeah, I don’t mean that they wouldn’t do well. But a whole album? You know? A whole album full of nothing, but heartbreak?” Yoongi continued, his voice showing first glimpses of agitation. You watched him, squinting slightly as you tried to find what to say. He paced back and forth by the tables as he explained, “I mean, intense emotion is fine. It’s appreciated. We work with it every time we’re in the studio. But there are only so many metaphors for getting your heart ripped out.”

Your eyes widened at the intense words—there was heartbreak, and then there was a ripped-out heart—but you hoped Yoongi didn’t catch it—he did—as you cleared your throat and composed yourself as much as possible before speaking.

“Was that…” you tried, your voice weak, “what his new song was about?”

“Not yet, because he only had one verse,” Yoongi admitted. He stopped pacing and began to watch you. You thought you had gotten used to him, but now you felt intimidated again, almost like the first time you’d met. “But he’s headed there.”

You were at a very awkward loss for words, so you only hummed and nodded lightly.

Yoongi continued in response to your silence, “he once told me that he texts someone else about his lyrics. Maybe not in this case, but perhaps he’s shown something else to, um... to this person?”

You lifted your eyebrows, not catching the insinuation. “Someone else is helping him?”

Yoongi seemed taken aback by your reaction.

“Oh, you didn’t—I was hoping that person was you. But you didn’t know?” he asked. There was a sharp edge in his voice that made you look down.

“No,” you admitted. You thought that was obvious, given your confusion about the specifics of this particular song. If you didn’t know about this one, why would you know what else he was working on?

And you felt irrational guilt at Yoongi’s question—or, rather, at the unintentional accusation in his tone—as you realised that despite your attempts, you didn’t really know everything that went on with the band.

“Okay. I guess that makes sense,” Yoongi said, needing a moment to compose himself. He was convinced that you were the one who reviewed Jungkook’s lyrics, but he could see now that it was unlikely. He couldn’t imagine you approving of the pain that Jungkook’s latest lyrics were so full of, not even for the greater good of the band.

But Yoongi couldn’t guess who else this person could be, because it wasn’t him or Hoseok, and it wasn’t Namjoon, either—none of the usual Rated Riot’s lyricists.

“Regardless,” Yoongi said. “That person could have influence over what he writes next.”

“And you don’t know who it is?” you clarified.

“I have no clue. He never told me.”

You hesitated before suggesting, “I-I guess I could ask him.”

That seemed to be what Yoongi was hoping for.

“Yeah, you should do that,” he said in a tone that he, once again, didn’t control very well. “Ask him what they think of his lyrics. Or, actually, maybe you should find that person yourself. I don’t know why Jungkook is being so secretive about it, anyway. It has to be someone on the label, don’t you think? Someone you would know.”

Yoongi didn’t intend to imply that you weren’t doing your job properly, but he could tell from your reaction that he may have done that. More careful now, he cleared his throat.

“Ah. I don’t know,” he continued, his voice gentler. He wasn’t angry or disappointed. Just anxious, he supposed, and his anxiety didn’t always translate into amiable words. “I mean, it’s great what he’s doing. I’m happy that he writes. But he puts a lot of pressure on himself. He feels a lot, even if he doesn’t always show it.”

“Yeah,” you agreed.

“Yeah,” he echoed. “So, I don’t want it to overwhelm him to the point where he’s blind to everything but the mess inside of him.”

Truthfully, Yoongi didn’t know how to approach Jungkook about this, but he couldn’t bring himself to admit it outright. It was a flaw he knew he had—which was more of an undeveloped skill than a flaw—but he preferred to be upfront. He didn’t think he was good at soothing someone’s feelings; he preferred to solve problems.

However, with Jungkook, being straightforward could feel like pouring salt on an open wound. Yoongi’s tendency to be blunt wasn’t suitable for everyone, and he didn’t want to make it worse for the younger member.

He suspected you’d be better at talking to him, and you understood that without Yoongi needing to ask you directly.

“I—yeah,” you said. “Thank you for coming to me. I’ll ask him.”

“Okay, thank you,” he said. Then, he quickly realised what he was saying—perhaps because of the solemn look on your face—and added, “oh, but don’t think it’s because you’ve known him the longest. Well, that should help. But, really, it’s just because you’re good at that. Talking. Just listening. I’m sure the other members would probably ask you to talk to me if I was the one in—um, in a crisis.”

You smiled at the mild word, but there was a sharp spasm in your chest—Nick’s offer to work with Reconnaissance—that made you avoid Yoongi’s gaze when he praised your communication skills.

“Thank you for saying that,” you replied.

He should have given himself more credit. He was clearly capable of saying the right thing at the right time. And your gratitude was the reason why you didn’t think now was the time to bring up Reconnaissance. Maybe that time would never come, and Nick’s offer would just pass. You hoped it would.

“Yeah,” Yoongi said, looking away. He picked up his water bottle again and reached for the door. “I’ll go back. You get some rest, okay? Don’t go looking for him right away. Do it when you’re feeling better.”

You nodded and watched him leave. Alone in the changing room, you swallowed the emotions that had been building up inside you and tried to figure out your next steps.

Deciding to focus on one of your roles – the present manager, not the manager-who-might-quit-but-probably-won’t, and certainly not the ex-girlfriend (although this role gained weird prominence in Europe) – you planned to find Jungkook after the show and talk to him.

About what Yoongi said. Not about anything else.

But as you left the dressing room to find Seokjin and Jimin, you realised that everything in your life was intertwined anyway, and you didn’t know if it would be possible to keep those two roles separate.

After the concert, you found Jungkook in the smoking area with his friends. They looked like you walked in carrying a pot of gold for the four of them. Except Minjun, who appeared almost wounded when he noticed you.

You did a double-take when you saw his reaction, thinking you had misunderstood. But he developed a sudden interest in the pavement tiles, so you couldn’t really look at him.

However, you didn’t want to worry about that when you were so close to Sid—and, therefore, on the edge of having to endure listening to his voice—so you ignored Minjun’s evasive gaze, and asked for a minute alone with Jungkook. Not only did you need to talk to him, but they were also smoking together right after Jungkook performed an 18-song set, so you had to split them up.

Feigning nonchalance, his three friends excused themselves. You turned around just in time to see them wiggling their eyebrows suggestively at Jungkook.

You chose to ignore their antics once more and noticed Jungkook doing the same as he put out his cigarette without lifting his gaze.

“I had an interesting conversation today,” you said as soon as the venue door closed, leaving you and Jungkook alone in the back of the building.

He had been worried when you asked for a minute alone and the first sense of awkwardness was starting to poke at his mind, but now that you had gotten straight to the point, he felt himself relax. Whatever it was that you wanted to talk to him about, it probably wasn’t as bad as what he’d been dreading.

“Hmm? With whom?” he asked.

“Yoongi,” you said. “He kind of scolded me a little, I think.”

Snickering, Jungkook nodded. Yoongi was the designated disciplinarian in the band. A role he did not accept, but enacted, nevertheless.

“Figures,” he remarked. “About what?”

You crossed your arms, still unaccustomed to the chilly wind, and shifted your weight from one foot to the other.

“Uh, apparently, you’re writing ballads?” you said.

Jungkook needed a second. “You got scolded because I’m writing ballads?”

“He doesn’t want your next record to be a ‘heartbreak anthem’,” you explained. “That’s a direct quote, by the way.”

If the night wasn’t so dark—the glow from the exit sign behind Jungkook wasn’t providing any actual light whatsoever—you would have noticed how he paled after hearing this.

He didn’t know how much Yoongi had told you, and he shouldn’t have been embarrassed in any case—if his lyrics became a song, he’d have to sing it not only in front of you, but in front of thousands of people.

But for some reason, the idea of a large crowd intimidated him less. So, he felt like he needed to do damage control for the one listener he was worried about.

“Oh,” he began slowly. “Well, it definitely won’t be. I’m just… doodling. I don’t know.”

That was a weak excuse. You both knew that if he shared his lyrics with anyone, whether it was Yoongi, or one of the producers—usually Namjoon—that meant he believed he had something worth sharing. He’d never show his “doodles” to anyone. He couldn’t look at some of them himself.

“It’s not just doodling,” you said. “Yoongi thinks it’s good. He just doesn’t want the whole record to be filled with similar slow-tempo songs.”

“Who said anything about slow-tempo?” he asked, even more surprised because he was fairly certain he had made it clear to the two boys that he didn’t have a definite melody yet. “We create music for people to scream along to.”

You smiled. That was a very simple way to put it.

“Well, Yoongi implied that the way you sang sounded kind of—”

“It’s just a demo,” he said. “I’m working on the melody.”

That was fair enough, and you nodded. “Okay.”

He watched you until your eyes moved to his. Suddenly scared, he looked away and stuffed his hands in his pockets. Unlike you, he wasn’t cold. Just overwhelmed by everything the two of you were not saying to each other right now.

“Yoongi also mentioned that there’s someone else you send your lyrics to,” you said—asked, maybe; you weren’t sure what you were hoping he’d say.

Jungkook looked startled. “He—what did he say?”

The demanding tone in his voice caught you off-guard.

“Uh, I’m not sure,” you said. “He doesn’t know who’s helping you and h-he just wants to—”

“He doesn’t need to know,” he interrupted, his voice firm. Evidently, this was not a discussion he wanted to have. “There’s no one helping me.”

Really, all this did was make you more curious about what was going on. A part of you wondered if the alleged love of his life in Paris was a real person, after all.

“Why does he think that there is, though?” you pushed.

“Because it’s—it doesn’t matter.” He shook his head, arms crossed and body turned away from you. “I just have someone who looks through the lyrics for me. That’s all.”

You raised an eyebrow. “A friend that I haven’t met?”

“You…” he hesitated. “You’ve met.”

It was possible, and far more likely, you supposed, that this person really was one of the producers at the label. Perhaps someone currently working with a different band, hence the secrecy.

“Okay,” you said, deciding to let it go. He was resisting your questions far too intensely. If Yoongi wanted to know more, he could put on his armour and go to battle himself. “Well, what do they think of your lyrics?”

“My lyrics are fine,” he said curtly. Then, in an eager attempt to change the topic, he asked, “why did Yoongi talk to you about my song in any case?”

“He’s concerned,” you replied.

“About what?”

“About your feelings,” you said, simplifying it so much that you didn’t blame Jungkook for rolling his eyes.

“Because we’re men and we don’t talk about our feelings,” he deadpanned.

“It’s not that. He just didn't know how to...” you faltered. “Well, I wanted to remind you that, uh, no matter what, if there’s something bothering you—even if you don’t want to talk to me about it, you can—”

The “no matter what” was what made him groan, cutting you off. The implication in your words was clear as the memory of the two of you in the bar last night flashed back through his mind.

But it was the insinuation that he’d want to talk to someone other than you that made him pull his hands out of his pockets in agitation.

“I wrote one song!” he declared, his voice gaining volume. Really, this wasn’t even what he was angry about. “Why are you acting like I’m standing on some ledge, about to jump?”

Unfazed by his reaction, you explained calmly, “Yoongi seemed to think you were headed straight down.”

He snickered sarcastically. “Ah. Hopeful for me, isn’t he? Is Namjoon coming to talk to you about his concern for me next? Did they decide to let you know about it, so you’d somehow end my pain and I’d start writing about love, and sunshine, and all the other joys of life instead?”

Truthfully, you hadn’t even considered that possibility. You assumed the rest of the band respected you too much to even mention your relationship with Jungkook, let alone suggest that you could influence him so much that he’d start writing about love instead of heartbreak.

And now you were the one whose skin prickled with shock.

“He—well, Yoongi didn’t say it like—did you, um—”

“If you’re worried that I told them what my songs are about,” Jungkook cut in, ending your near-panicked stuttering, “then I don’t think I have to tell them anything. I’m pretty sure they know enough.”

“No, I…” you began, but claiming that you weren’t worried about that was a lie. You tried again, “I didn’t talk to Namjoon at all. And as for Yoongi—I-I don’t think he was worried about the topic of your lyrics. Not exactly. He just wanted to make sure you’re okay. That’s why he came to me. So I’d check up on you.”

The more you repeated your reasoning, the clearer it became to him that you were just trying to convince yourself. He believed that you were running away from the blatant fact that he was writing about you, and that had to be the reason why Yoongi wanted to talk to you.

Jungkook couldn’t help but snort, mumbling a cynical, “funny.”

Your brows furrowed. “What?”

“Just the way you believe the explanations that you prefer,” he said, an almost hostile glint in his eyes, “instead of the ones that are actually more plausible.”

He was blind to the possibility that his own assumptions could have been wrong, but his words were too unexpected for you to point that out.

Surprised by the accusation, you leaned back so far that you almost tumbled backwards. “Excuse me?”

“Don’t get offended,” he said. He had already stopped talking about his lyrics and Yoongi’s reasoning for talking to you. “I sometimes do it, too. It’s just that, what I prefer to believe is, clearly, different from you.”

You guessed that this wasn’t about your conversation with Yoongi. That this was actually about last night and many nights before.

But you didn’t want to be the one to remind him that he was the reason why you left the bar yesterday. He was the one who ended the conversation on the bridge. He was the one who lied to you about Paris.

If anyone had the right to raise their voice, it was you.

You pursed your lips and regarded him for a few seconds before asking, “is there something you want to talk to me about?”

He looked away. “Later.”

“Later?” You scowled. “When?”

“When the time is right,” he answered, not trying to be ominous but coming off that way anyway.

“When the—okay.” You dropped your hands to your sides and brushed your fingers against your thighs as you looked at the parking lot on your left. “Why don’t you channel this drama into songwriting? Despite Yoongi’s concern, he’s happy you’re writing. And proud.”

Your gentle delivery touched him more than he’d anticipated, and he blinked, turning to look at you with unexpected warmth in his gaze.

He asked softly, “he said that?”

“He didn’t have to,” you said. “But maybe that’s another thing I choose to believe because that’s what I prefer.”

He exhaled and closed his eyes. “I didn’t mean anything by that.”

“And I didn’t take anything from it, just that you have a point,” you said, bringing your tongue over your lips as you tried to focus on being less petty and more professional. “I have to go back now. But maybe—if whatever you want to talk to me about needs a specific timing, then—”

“I’ll come find you,” he finished.

You watched him for a silent minute while last night played back in your mind in excruciating reverse.

“I was going to say,” you replied, “that perhaps it’d be better if you didn’t.”

He did not seem disturbed by this. “I know.”

“Y-you know what?”

“That you would think that.”

Offended once more—largely because it seemed like you didn’t have to speak at all, he could tell what you were going to say anyway—you clicked your tongue.

“Okay,” you said. “In that case—”

“I’m still going to find you,” he cut in.

You were glaring now. “And if I’m not there when you come looking for me?”

Simply, he said, “I’ll make sure you are.”

“Okay. That’s really—no, you know what?” you paused before the irritation could get the best of you. Maybe the two of you should talk, you figured. To prevent this from escalating and then abruptly stopping. “Fine. Find me. We’ll talk.”

“Okay,” he said.

You nodded. “Until the time is right then.”

You smiled a little as you said this—you weren’t trying to, but the phrase sounded far too ridiculous—and Jungkook felt his shoulders relax.

He smiled back—not because he was trying to, either, but if you smiled, his reflexes moved before he could control them—and nodded back. “Until then.”

Since the flight to Amsterdam was tomorrow morning, you had to spend another night on the bus. Equipped with chamomile tea and a face mask, you dreaded another sleepless night, but the silence of the truck stop at nearly three in the morning along with the peacefulness inside of the bus as the exhausted band slept, felt comforting.

Considering how little sleep you got the night before, you began to doze off almost as soon as you washed your face and retreated to your bunk. But then a familiar sound of agitated shuffling brought you back to full consciousness.

You listened for a moment, confirming that it was indeed Jungkook who was beside himself again, when suddenly, he spoke into the darkness of the bus, “are you awake?”

Even though he didn’t address you directly, you knew the question was meant for you.

You cleared your throat before whispering, “yeah.” And, because he didn’t say anything else for a while, you added, “why are you awake?”

“I can’t sleep,” he whispered back. “What about you?”

“Me neither, I guess,” you replied, your breathing slowing as your brain alternated between being acutely aware of him and dozing off. “What’s on your mind?”

He didn’t respond and after waiting for a minute, you assumed he ended up falling asleep after all.

But a moment later, you heard the soft squeak of feet against the bus floor, and felt the mattress shift as Jungkook climbed into the bunk next to you. He moved swiftly, catching you so off-guard that you just watched him with helpless eyes as he drew the curtains on your bunk.

You were both completely covered by the darkness, but you could still see his silhouette as he lied down next to you and did not speak.

Different rules applied to conversations at night, you supposed. And your mind functioned differently, too—because you should have asked him what he was doing. Should have clarified if he hadn’t gone out of his mind. Should have explained the possible repercussions of his actions (namely, a bruised ass after you kicked him off the bunk).

Instead, you stayed still.

And it was very strange to sense him here, to feel his warmth, but lie here frozen, too scared to accidentally touch him and find out that he wasn’t really here, that you had just fallen asleep without realising.

But he was here, and you were both, more or less, awake.

And this was what he wanted – to feel safe in the darkness of your bunk, so far away from the bet that he could easily pretend he’d never made it.

“Is this when the time is right?” you asked finally, a teasing tone in your quiet voice. “3 AM?”

“Yes,” he replied, relieved that you greeted him with a joke, and not a kick in the shins.

He hadn’t actually planned it this way. And he wasn’t entirely sure what brought him to your bunk tonight, in particular—maybe your encouraging words about his writing? The tension as you avoided talking about last night?

Or maybe it was just you, always lingering in the corners of his mind. You were present in every one of his memories, no matter how obscure or distant it was. Even before he met you, your absence was noticeable, and it was so significant that he could never overlook it.

Ah. He’d sense the gap in his memory and think of you right away. This was two months before I met you.

He couldn’t escape you and, frankly, he’d given up trying.

He realised he couldn’t control himself any longer. Whatever had been building up inside of him for the past few days had now gotten complete control over him.

The two of you were separated from the rest of the bus by a curtain—like a little private haven in the midst of a larger world—and once your eyes adjusted to the darkness, you felt your breath catch in your throat.

Your gaze drifted out of focus as you strained to keep your eyes locked on his. It would have been so much easier to just glance down, to trace the lines of his nose and cheeks, down to his lips. It would have been easier to reach out and feel him here, to physically make sure this wasn’t a nightmare where he found you just before the whole world collapsed.

But you knew how inappropriate this was and how many lines this crossed: no one else in Rated Riot could just climb into your bunk and lie down next to you like this. It was unheard of, just like the almost-kiss at the bar last night.

As though the two of you were sharing the same memory in real-time, Jungkook spoke up, “I’m sorry.”

Breathless, you asked—not for the first time, “for what?”

“Lots of things,” he replied, his words barely audible, yet very loud when he was so close to you. “But mostly about what happened at the bar the other night.”

“Nothing happened at the bar,” you whispered back.

You heard him swallow before he spoke again. “That’s what I’m sorry about.”

You turned onto your back, creating more distance. Asking him to leave, somehow, didn’t seem to appear in your mind as an option.

“You don’t need to apologise for things that don’t happen,” you said in a very official voice. Hearing it unsettled him. “It’s, um—it’s actually good that nothing happened. Late-night drinking and a busy schedule don’t mix well.”

He noticed that you were drifting back to your professional role, that he’d lost the element of surprise.

Looking down, he admitted, “last night wasn’t… a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing.”

You didn’t look at him no matter how much you wanted to. “No?”

“No,” he confirmed. “Isn’t it obvious?”

“I don’t know,” you said, adamantly staring at the ceiling of your bunk as you felt his eyes return to your face. “It’s hard to tell with you.”

“I know.”

“And I don’t want to make assumptions in case I’m believing what I prefer to—”

He sighed, interrupting you. “Everyone does that. I didn’t mean to imply it’s just you. I’m just… I wish you saw things from my perspective.”

“Yeah.” You played with your fingers, intertwining your hands and resting them on your stomach. “That would be easier.”

“But you know me better than anyone,” he said, “so I think you’ve earned the right to make assumptions about me.”

You shook your head gently against the pillow. “You wouldn’t like my assumptions.”

“Try me.”

Finally, you turned your head to look at him. The brightness of his eyes in the dark corner of the bus made you waver slightly, already in the process of looking away, but you licked your lips and composed yourself.

“Okay,” you said. “Well, I assume there’s an external force that’s causing you to do whatever you’re doing, or feel whatever you think you’re feeling. That’s why you keep these secrets. Why you’re so selective about what you tell me. And it’s why you keep, uh, doing something and then stopping yourself.”

Jungkook felt a freezing wave wash over him. “W-what do you mean? What external force?”

“I don’t know,” you replied, sounding genuine. “Maybe it’s what I said before. A different continent, being away from home.”

He was so certain you’d tell him you knew about the bet that he exhaled in immense relief when you didn’t.

“I told you it’s not that,” he said, feeling a rush of happiness—undeserved, but irresistible—that you didn’t know.

You insisted, “right, but it is. Here, you’re doing—we’re both doing things we wouldn’t do back home.”

“Maybe it’s just that here, I have the chance to do the things I wouldn’t be able to do back home,” he argued kindly—like an adult with a toddler who was upset that the sun went down at night, not realising that their own perception of the world could not change the way the world actually was.

Oddly enough, it didn’t feel patronising. You’d thought you were figuring out what was going on with him when, deep down, you—sort of—already knew. You just tried to find an explanation that you preferred –  just as he’d said before.

“It’s just…” you started, hesitating. “Whatever we do here, it will still have consequences back home, you know? It’s not a What-Happens-in-Vegas sort of thing. Not with us.”

“I know,” he said again, and then, most dangerously, he admitted, “and I’m hoping for that.”

“You—you keep changing your mind,” you reminded him, watching the ceiling of your bunk because you couldn’t watch him. “Stopping when it feels like—”

“I know,” he whispered.

“I don’t understand.”

“I… I don’t entirely understand it, either,” he said. “I guess I’m scared of… well, everything.”

“Hmm.” You swallowed. And because this was vulnerable to admit and you hated yourself for feeling this way, you continued, but only in a tentative whisper, “to me, it feels like you know it’s a mistake. Like you regret your actions when you—”

“The only thing I regret is—” he cut himself off, suddenly losing courage. He inhaled and tried again, “what I regret is stopping. I regret not doing what every piece of me wanted to do at that moment. In Stockholm. And in Oslo.”

Quietly, you suggested, “it’s probably the rational part of you that holds you back.”

“You’re my rational part,” he countered. “And I keep coming back to you no matter how hard I try to stay away. I keep crossing the line, I guess.”

You turned to him. “I keep letting you cross it.”

He nodded, his eyes on you. “I know.”

You didn’t know what to say because the pounding in your chest was suffocating. As if your heart had expanded and decided you no longer needed lungs.

Then, Jungkook said into the silence, “I—I wasn’t lying when I took you to Kihyun’s wedding in hopes of getting back together with the love of my life, you know.”

You closed your eyes and exhaled pleadingly, “Jungkook…”

“What?” he asked, a mix of desperation and eagerness in his voice.

You turned to your side, so you were fully facing him, and rested your head on the back of your hand as you watched him for a minute.

Neither of you spoke. You were both waiting.

“I know,” you finally began, “that I have to be the responsible person in a lot of situations with you.” You paused, looking down briefly to gather your thoughts. “But I can’t do it like this. So, please, don’t put me in a position where I have to make the choice that would be best for us. Best for the band. Because I’m not sure I will.”

You were asking him for something, and both of you quickly realised that it wasn’t a request to stop. To pull away. To leave.

“The best choice,” he said, “isn’t always the more responsible one.”

“It usually is.”

Repeating your previous words, he said, “not with us.”

You bit your lower lip as you struggled to formulate a response, let alone a coherent thought.

“You… you’re making me feel overwhelmed,” you finally said, expressing the only thing you were certain of.

“How so?” he asked.

“I forget everything,” you said. “Especially the fact that morning will come and there will be questions about why you’re here and not in your own bunk.”

Jungkook swallowed, the realisation dawning on him.

“You care what other people will think,” he said.

“I have to,” you replied somewhat sadly. It was precisely this sadness that gave him hope and courage to respond.

“I understand,” he said. “I can go.”

You clenched your jaw.

“You should,” you said.

His eyes remained locked on yours. “Do you want me to?”

Your voice was barely audible when you responded, “no.”

Jungkook took a shaky breath. His body shuffled closer. You felt his warmth, felt his thigh touch yours.

 “I… I’ll ask you again,” he said, inhaling deeply after every second word, and inching closer to you each time his chest rose. “Don’t think as our manager. Just for five minutes. Five minutes that won’t mean anything once they’re over.”

You gave a small shake of your head. “What’s the point, then?”

“I just have to know what it’d be like if we were us again,” he said. “Even if only for five minutes.”

You closed your eyes again. You knew it wasn’t that simple. You couldn’t just shut everything off for five minutes and then go back to the way things were as if nothing happened—it was absurd to even think that was possible.

But you nodded, exhaling softly as you looked at him again. The hopeful glint in his eye was still visible, even in the darkness of your bunk.

“Okay,” you breathed.

The bus was silent, amplifying the sound of his pulse in his ears as he reached for you, softly touching your cheek with the tips of his fingers.

All this time, you had been so close to him, yet he did not touch you. It felt like he had to make up for it now as he caressed the side of your face, almost in disbelief that you weren’t just a manifestation of every peaceful dream he’d ever had. That somehow, just by being, you perfectly captured everything he wanted. Everything he needed.

You inhaled his familiar scent – your bunk so full of it that you were positively drowning in him and not trying to stay afloat at all – as your eyes fluttered close. The rest of the world faded away as you felt his breath on your face for just a second, his lips hovering over yours, touching them, but not quite.

A quiet whimper broke off a much deeper whine inside of you and found its way past your lips as you parted them. Your lower lip brushed against his in a moment so charged with invisible power—some innate electricity—that you felt his body twitch against yours.

And then finally, he pressed his lips to yours.

The softness of his lips brought back something that you’d buried deep within; something that came awake late at night in the form of dreams so intense that you’d need a moment in the morning to realise it had only been a dream.

It felt like it now.

Except, as you reached out a hand to touch his chest, he was here.

His lips gently moved against yours as he tilted your face to kiss you harder. His lip ring felt cold against your lower lip, but his embrace was warm and eager. You were breathless, your mind was swimming in memories, but you were not asleep.

He was here, he was here, he was here.

He was here and he felt you move closer, your hand sliding down his chest, pausing momentarily as if frightened by the rapid beating under your fingertips. He exhaled against your mouth, pulling away for less than a second to take a new breath—he only had five minutes with you, he did not have the luxury to breathe anything but you right now. Then, he connected your lips again, his tongue finding yours as deepened the kiss.

The space in your bunk had always felt cramped—every morning, you’d wake up with bruises on your limbs—but now it seemed so impossibly vast, and he couldn’t pull you close enough.

His kiss was as intoxicating as it was sobering, an oxymoron of an embrace. No matter how overwhelmed, how utterly dizzy, light, or heavy it made you feel, you kissed him back.

Your fingers got lost in his hair as he gently pushed your shoulder, rolling you over to your back. He hovered above you, resting one elbow on the mattress and holding your face with his other hand. His thigh came to rest between your legs and your small yelp of surprise at the sudden change of position barely made any sound before his lips were on yours again, gentle and rushing. If anyone asked if he missed you, he could never find adequate words, so he poured all his feelings into this kiss.

The familiarity of his mouth against yours and the taste of his tongue in your mouth caused the back of your neck to prickle with nostalgia for the missing years and eagerness for more. Eagerness for a future that you couldn’t have because you’d promised each other five minutes.

Granted, it was difficult to gauge how much time had passed, as neither of you cared enough to open your eyes, comfortable in the private bubble of darkness.

Your bodies were so accustomed to one another that you did not need to see to know where to touch. Your hands wandered freely across the old paths, drawing over the blurred lines of the maps on each other’s skin.

You learned to ignore the ache in your lungs, because the ache in your chest was stronger. It gripped your heart with claws so deep that it drew blood every time you considered pulling away.

The warmth of his mouth contrasted with the coldness of his fingertips as he gently traced them over the side of your face, neck, shoulders, and over to your hips. His hand slipped under your loose t-shirt, drawing tentative symbols over the parts of your skin that he could reach without pulling his lips away from yours.

He thought he had suffocated a long time ago as the pulse in his ears was replaced by the sound of your mouths moving against each other in a perfectly balanced rhythm—as if you practised every day. As if the four-year intermission had never existed.  

Jungkook felt no sense of being alive, there was no room for it. All he felt was you. And if this was what death felt like, he was perfectly fine with being buried six feet deep like this.

Then – a bump somewhere on the bus jolted you both back to reality.

You both stilled, listening for any signs of movement to confirm that you weren’t the only ones awake. But there was nothing.

Your eyes met in the darkness, and you pulled away, his taste lingering on your lips. You thought you could see him more clearly than before, despite it still being pitch-black in your bunk.

“I think we’ve gone over five minutes,” you whispered, running your tongue over your slightly swollen lips.

“Give me a few extra seconds,” he whispered and leaned in to press another kiss, his tongue meeting yours against your lower lip. A smile stretched on your face as he whispered against your lips, “I’ve waited four years for this.”

You exhaled, your body trembling under him. “This might be the worst thing I’ve agreed to do with you.”

He smiled and reminded you, “you came to Paris with me on a whim.”

“That didn’t take me weeks to recover from,” you said quietly.

He remained mere inches away and his kisses turned into gentle brushes of his cheek against yours. Both of your chests kept rising, then falling—meeting each other, then separating again in a dramatic parallel of your lives—as you tried to catch your breath.

“But this will?” he asked.

“It will.”

Pulling away to look at you, he said, “lucky.”

“How is that lucky?” you asked.

He kissed you once more. There was a certain melancholy in his smile when he pulled away.

“At least you’ll recover,” he said.

You swallowed and opened your eyes, painfully aware of his close proximity and the forbidden nature of it all.

“You will, too,” you said, almost hunching over from the sudden pain in your chest as he sat down next to you. “Five minutes that mean nothing once they’re over, remember?”

You spoke softly, almost apologetically, but what hurt the most was the absence of regret in your voice.

At least, if you regretted what had happened, he would know that it was over for good.

“Right.” He nodded, avoiding your gaze and struggling to get to his feet, because every single fibre of his being pulled him to you. “I’m—I’ll go. You can tell Yoongi not to worry, by the way. I have five minutes of what-might-have-been to write about.”

“You—”

“I’m just kidding,” he said, shooting you a grin.

Before you could notice how sad his eyes looked despite the smile, he leaned in to kiss you goodbye. Funnily enough, this was the kiss that you would spend the whole night thinking about: how natural, familiar, and necessary it had felt.

“These five minutes are between us,” he reiterated for your benefit. “We’ll never speak of it again.”

He pulled back the curtain of your bunk and glanced around to make sure everyone else was asleep. Suddenly, you touched his shoulder and he turned to you again, unsure if your touch was real or just his wishful thinking.

“F-for what it’s worth,” you said, “I really hope there’s an alternative universe where this could work. And not just for five minutes.”

Jungkook thought this could work in this universe, too, but he nodded, hung his head, and quietly climbed out of your bunk, leaving your curtain open as he returned to his own bed.

He hadn’t realised how cold it was on the bus.

chapter title credits: bring me the horizon, “deathbeds”

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sleepwalking ● 19 | jjk

pairing: jungkook x fem!reader

summary: due to unfortunate circumstances, you ended up managing your ex-boyfriend’s band. you thought you’ve both made peace with it, but suddenly he’s very eager to prove to you that first love never dies.

genre: rockstar!jungkook / exes to lovers

warnings: explicit language, ANGST & FLUFF (i mean it, watch out), SLOW BURN

words: 14.5k

read from the beginning ○ masterlist

chapter 19 ► so dig two graves, ‘cause when you die, i swear i’ll be leaving by your side

When the tour bus arrived in Glasgow, you realised that you had slept perhaps a quarter of an hour in total tonight. Discomfort and Regret had become unwelcome companions that kept you up.

Last night, you had planned to talk to Jungkook, but he flipped the script and did all the talking instead. And if you had to describe your choices from then on, you’d have to accept that, essentially, you had run away without saying anything.

You realised now, through tossing and turning in your bunk the whole bus journey, that this was your recurring pattern.

When you and Jungkook first broke up, you’d barricaded yourself in your apartment and only ventured outside when it was unavoidable, like to go to work. Or when your friends forced you out of bed. They tolerated your need for silence in moderation—a few days of self-imposed isolation were okay. But two consecutive weeks was a little excessive.

In Stockholm, the impulse to run away had gripped you right after your conversation on the bridge sank abruptly in the waters below. In Oslo, you had actually run away after you’d almost kissed. You could still feel the shivers on your skin from the cold night air on the rooftop terrace. And, of course, you’d also planned to avoid him when you arrived in Manchester.

It was a pattern that was doomed to end in failure every time, yet you stubbornly refused to give it up.

You wanted to escape the feelings that frightened you, but they only ran faster. They chased after you like daunting shadows. They caught up with you. They engulfed you.

This perpetual cycle wasn’t just futile, it was also unfair—to you and to Jungkook. And to Rated Riot, too.

It had gone on for too long.

You were determined to redeem that today.

While Jungkook and the boys were doing an interview on a local radio station after the soundcheck, you chose to stay at the venue to work. Initially, you only intended to answer internal company emails and update the label executives, but unsurprisingly, that morphed into more tasks that needed your immediate attention.

Seated at your laptop in the band’s dressing room, you spent a good couple of hours finalising Rated Riot’s schedule for the rest of the week, emailing back journalists and verifying their credentials before issuing backstage passes for upcoming interviews, and humming along to a tune playing in your headphones.

It was then—during the chorus of an old Bad Omens song that was loud and messy enough to keep your mind alert and focused—that Seokjin decided to tap you on the back.

You jumped up as high as it was humanly possible and pushed your laptop away as if to protect it from intruders—which was what your mind assumed Seokjin to be, apparently. He took a step back, shocked and very entertained by your violent startle.

“Shit, sorry,” he said, attempting to suppress a smile. “You’ve been—you’ve been working here by yourself for hours. I’m taking a coffee break. Want to join me?”

With one hand pressed to your chest, you slid your headphones off and checked the time on the corner of your laptop screen. “Uh, sure. Coffee sounds nice.”

The two of you found a quaint café a few blocks from Barrowland where Rated Riot would be playing later that evening. But despite the cosy setting, you chose to grab your coffee to-go. It was a warm, sunny day outside. Seokjin thought you could use some fresh air.

“So,” he said eagerly, as soon as the café bell tinkled, announcing your exit, “what’s on your mind?”

You met his question with surprise. “What do you mean?”

He maintained an air of nonchalance, sipping his Americano and observing casually, “your pupils are massive. You look like you’re planning a revolution. Or a massacre.”

You took a sip of your drink and regretted not stirring the caramel in better. You wondered what it would be by the end of tonight: revolution or massacre.

“I was—well, it’s nothing much,” you said. “I was just thinking that things might be different when we got home.”

“How so?”

The two of you crossed the street towards a small, vibrant green space—not quite a park—with a tree-lined pathway in the middle and an old blue police box nearby, reminiscent of Doctor Who.

“Well,” you said, “I hear Brazil is really nice that time of year.”

“You’re thinking of going on holiday?” Seokjin asked, surprised. He’s known you since you joined the company, even before you started to manage Rated Riot, and he was well aware of your lack of holidays. The HR department, however, remained blissfully ignorant about it.

You shrugged. “For starters.”

“And then?”

“And then we’ll see.”

The ambiguity in your response wasn’t worrying in itself, but combined with your reluctance to meet his gaze and the intense concentration on your coffee—even though you winced every time you took a sip—it was certainly alarming.

“You’re not… going to quit, are you?” he asked hesitantly. “I’ve heard about Reconnaissance.”

Of course, he’d heard. At this point, enough people knew about it for the news to have a ripple effect and circulate backstage.

“No,” you said, trying to dispel the tension with an airy laugh. “Of course not.”

He nodded. “Okay.”

“I’d find a replacement first.”

Seokjin’s casual stride came to an abrupt halt. A few steps ahead, you realised he’d stopped and turned around.

“No,” he said.

His firm declaration made you stutter. “Th-that—that wasn’t a question.”

“And that’s not an option,” he argued. “You can’t quit.”

“I’m not saying I’m leaving for sure. I’m just saying that if I did leave, you wouldn’t even notice the difference,” you said. “I’m a very good teacher.”

With that, you started to walk away, leaving him little choice but to catch up.

“And I love all of you guys,” you continued while Seokjin grunted next to you. “I wouldn’t leave you with someone I didn’t personally trust to take care of you and the band.”

He shook his head, his determination unwavering. If he had known about the band members’ conviction that no one would blame you if you left Rated Riot due to the alluring offer from Reconnaissance, Seokjin might have been tempted to express his disagreement with his fists.

Of course, people would blame you—Seokjin was the people in question.

You belonged here. You were an essential part of the team.

He was convinced of this, and he was going to be annoying about it.

“Okay, I appreciate that,” he said, his tone tinged with incredulity. “Except, what the fuck are you thinking? Of course, we’d notice the difference! You’re you. We love you.”

“That means a lot—”

“But not enough?”

You hesitated, caught off guard by the intensity of his anger. “No, it’s—”

“Alright, look.” He stopped walking again, the paper cup of coffee in his hand more of an accessory than a beverage. “Is this about Jungkook?”

An unexpected heat surged through you and a cascade of excuses immediately raced through your mind. You scanned the pathway, reading the names of the bands imprinted into the pavement with colourful stripes—artists who’d performed at Barrowland before, you assumed—so you wouldn’t have to look at him.

But this was Seokjin. If there was anyone who knew everything that was going on in the band, it was him. You didn’t want to give him pretend reasons.

“In part,” you admitted.

“Well, if that’s the case, then it’s an even more definite no,” he asserted, his resolve unyielding.

You sighed and attempted to smile, but there was a hint of awkwardness in your expression. “I’m not taking votes, Jin. I’ll talk to Jungkook about this, and—”

“You can talk to anyone you like. All the gods you can find, even,” he interrupted. “But you’re not leaving.”

“Jin—”

“Look, when you accepted this job, the fact that you and Jungkook used to know each other didn’t matter,” he stated, tactfully omitting the word ‘relationship’—a nuance you appreciated. “What difference does it make now?”

As you bit your lip and lowered your eyes, Seokjin sensed that there was a difference, after all. It occurred to him that perhaps he wasn’t entirely up to speed on everything that was happening on the tour, after all.

“Okay, you don’t want to talk about it, and I’m not asking you to,” he said, his words gentle, but his tone strict. “What I’m saying is that nobody cares. You can date, you can break up, you can—I don’t know. You can pretty much do anything as long as you don’t kill each other. No one cares.”

“The label cares,” you blurted, the words unpolished and agitated. “I care.”

He waved his free hand dismissively. “The label cares about profit. We’re making a profit from you both. Maybe even more when you’re together because you’re both less annoying that way.”

Your eyebrows furrowed. “How are we annoying?”

“Are you kidding? All mopey and sulky?” He stuck his tongue out and pretended to gag. “You make me sick and miserable.”

You snickered softly at the dramatic display. “Fair. Sorry. But fact is, it’s still a good opportunity.”

“Well, sure,” he conceded. “But is that really the reason you want to leave? Or is it because you think that what you’re doing with Jungkook is wrong? You think others will disapprove or think less of you. You think this is highly unprofessional, and it would make more sense to work elsewhere.”

It felt oddly incongruous to hear him articulate—so easily, without a moment’s hesitation—everything that you had been thinking.

“Well, that’s a factor, too, of course…” you said, your voice faltering.

“I think that’s the main factor.”

Taking a sip of your coffee, you mumbled, “I think you think too much.”

“I think you don’t think enough,” he countered. “You can’t leave, not even for Reconnaissance. You’re part of the team, our team. We all are.”

You looked at him, and he raised his eyebrows expectantly—waiting, clearly, for you to admit defeat.

While you didn’t technically need his consent to quit, the sheer determination in his stance made you feel as though his approval was, indeed, a prerequisite for anyone choosing to leave.

“Now you’re making me feel guilty,” you said.

“As you should!” he said—nearly bellowing in his frustration. “But you should feel guilty about mistakenly thinking that you should leave. Not about being in love with him.”

His words struck a deep chord and your heart began to rattle violently in your chest. “I’m—right. Yeah. I need to talk to him about—about everything.”

His tone softened at your reaction.

“I think you should sit down for ten minutes and gather your thoughts before you do that,” he advised. “You should sit and accept that we don’t care if you go out with Jungkook. Whatever you decide, we’re all cool with it. As long as you are, too.”

Afraid that your eyes would betray your thoughts, you shifted your gaze to the silver barks of the graceful birch trees around you. “Do you know about the bet?”

Seokjin took a slow sip of his coffee to allow more time between these overlapping conversations.

“Yeah,” he said. “Is that... uh, have you two worked it out?”

“We’ve—I think we have. I think the bet wasn’t even the main issue, actually, it just—it sort of highlighted all our problems,” you admitted. “We—we’ll have to work through the rest.”

“Right. Okay,” he said. The sun rolled out from behind the buildings, casting a golden glow on the trees and the empty path ahead of you. He squinted and took a sip of his coffee before speaking. “Well, then I can safely tell you that everyone backstage knows about it.”

The disappointment on your face was absolute. “Oh. That—that’s lovely.”

He smiled sympathetically as the two of you continued down the faintly coloured path. Despite the sunshine, the cool breeze toyed relentlessly with the edges of your jackets.

“Don’t worry about it too much, though,” he said. “It’s nothing more than a silly joke backstage. We’re not judging either of you.”

You did worry about it. “What… do you mean by ‘silly joke,’ exactly?”

The two of you arrived at a large sycamore tree with leaves that glimmered in emerald hues under the sun, and Seokjin stopped, grateful for the shade.

“One of the roadies started it,” he explained. “It was just a game. A bet, actually! Funny.” He chuckled at the irony, but stopped himself when he noticed your stoic expression. “Anyway. Someone suggested that Jungkook’s friends were trying to sabotage your relationship by making this bet with him. So, we bet on Jungkook fighting his friends for you. Which—that cost me money, actually. When he showed up at the airport in Cologne with a black eye, I lost fifty euros.”

It took you a minute to process this, and you felt so uncomfortable that your fists itched with an urge to fight someone, too.

“You—so, you bet that he wouldn’t fight his friends?” you clarified, almost hopeful.

“No. I bet that he would,” he said. “But I got too big-headed and bragged about how he wouldn’t miss a single punch. So, everyone claimed that I lost and took my money. Really, I thought he knew how to fight. And he was doing it for a noble cause.” A dramatic pause ensued, and then Seokjin smirked. “I mean you, by the way.”

“No, yeah, I got that,” you said bitterly. “But you didn’t even know the actual—everyone just assumed he had a black eye because of me?”

He pulled his lips together to stifle a chuckle as he moved his cup of coffee away.

“Can you blame us?” he asked with a leisurely shrug. “He’s in love with you, and his friends are complete idiots. And then he shows up with a black eye! The dots connected themselves. Although, personally, I thought Luna or Maggie could have socked him in the eye, too. You three are very protective of each other.”

You tilted your head, your posture a warning. “I see. So, we’re a telenovela to you. Did you bet that I would knock someone out if I found out what you were up to?”

“Not yet,” he said, clearly delighted by the prospect of this happening in the future.

“Did you get your money back at least?”

“Yeah. But then I lost it again.”

The leaves of the sycamore tree rustled impatiently as you groaned. “How?”

“Another bet,” he said. “Some people—including Jimin, by the way—thought that Jungkook’s friends would never come to another Rated Riot show. In the UK specifically. We were very specific about the details in this bet.”

“Right, of course.”

He smirked, unapologetic about the amusement he derived from this. There were all sorts of games happening backstage at any given point in the tour; nearly everything became a joke here. And Seokjin hoped to show you that yes, people did know about you and Jungkook. But unless they could find ways to make it funny, they didn’t care.

He could tell that the more he talked to you about this, the more you started to recognise the absurdity of it all, too.

“Right. Well, Jimin won that round. I actually—I thought Jungkook would change his mind and bring his friends back,” Seokjin confessed. “Serves me right. I should have trusted him more.”

You raised your cup in his direction.

“Yeah,” you said. “Serves you right for making bets about this. He blacklisted Sid.”

“He—oh!” Seokjin seemed very pleased to hear this. “Well, that was worth my money, then.”

“Hmm.”

He grinned, the mischief still lingering in his eyes.

“We have another bet going on,” he said.

“Anoth—well, of course.” Your teeth dug into the coffee lid as you tried to take a sip, but reconsidered. “So, what? Who’s getting a black eye this time?”

“It’s whether you’ll get back together.”

Your irritation wavered in surprise. A rustling stirred inside you as though you had swallowed the wind and carried it within.

“Well,” you said. “Where’d you place your bets?”

“Drink your coffee,” he said. You did. It had cooled and turned unpleasantly sweet as the caramel settled. “I haven’t bet on that yet. But if you told me if you’re considering going back to him, I could win my money back.”

You made sure to swallow before looking up.

“That’s not solely up to me, though,” you said, sensing an obvious defensive undertone in your own voice. You didn’t make much effort to conceal it; he would have read right through you anyway. “A relationship typically involves two people. I can’t force him to be in it.”

Seokjin offered a patient smile.

“Please,” he said. “Everyone knows he’d burn down half of Europe for you.”

You swallowed again.

It was just you. The only one still fighting it.

“Well, in any case—” Seokjin said, distracted, suddenly, by a particularly cheeky pigeon that kept flying up to your ankles, then to your knees. “That bird is going to steal your coffee.”

You glanced down, and the shift in your position frightened the pigeon into flying a few metres away. Seokjin nodded in approval.

“Anyway,” he said. “What I meant to say is that I don’t know how much my opinion is worth, but if the only reason you’re considering quitting is because of this, then that’s nothing. You sit down, you work through your problems, you get back together, and you’re good to go. Well, good to stay. It’s up to you. No one else cares.”

You raised your eyebrows. “Everyone’s talking. They’re making bets about us. We—we’re a joke backstage. And yet you think we should get back together?”

“Yeah.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Give us something else to bet on.”

Exasperation flashed across your face. “I’m thinking I’d like to sic that pigeon on you a little bit.”

“Oh, but what would you do without me?” He was grinning in a manner so endearing and genuine that you felt your lips stretch into a defeated smile as well. “You know we’re family. That is what we do. And you said it yourself – everyone’s already talking. And no one’s truly bothered by it. You might as well do what you want.”

You took a big gulp of your coffee to finish it.

Some of the humour faded from his eyes while he watched you. He looked around—to make sure the pigeon hadn’t returned and to gather his thoughts.

“Just think about it, okay?” he said. “You know how they say ‘measure twice, cut once’? Why don’t you measure three times? Four, even. Five. Or, I don’t know, as many times as it takes until you realise that there’s no need to cut anything. Everything’s great as it is.”

Your face felt warm. “That’s very profound.”

“It is.” He nodded, his exaggerated confidence faltering a little when he saw the gratitude in your eyes and suddenly found himself timid. “I’ve also got a few carpentry jokes if you’re in the mood for those.”

Laughing finally, you shook your head. “Maybe later. But thank you for this.”

“You’re welcome,” he said. “And notice how I’m not saying ‘anytime’? Because there can’t be another time that this happens. In fact, the next time I see you, it’ll be as if we never had this conversation.”

Still smiling despite his threatening tone, you put your palm to your forehead and extended your fingers in a salute. “Sir, yes, sir.”

He nodded, content with your response.

“Now go back to that café and bring me a scone,” he ordered, his expression bright again. “I got distracted by your misery and forgot to buy one.”

You snorted and nodded—you did owe him a scone, at the very least. Seokjin stepped deeper into the shade by the tree and waited while you jogged back towards the café. He looked up to see your lighthearted expression reflected in the window across the street and felt himself exhale in relief.

He’d done his job—you knew everyone needed you here.

You returned to the venue with enough scones for the whole staff, and as you passed them out, almost everyone on the team regarded you with a mix of curiosity and anticipation. It was a nice change from their earlier concerns about your health, but you still felt uncomfortable.

There was an obvious reason you enjoyed working backstage: here, you successfully evaded the spotlight. You did your work quietly and got to spend time with your friends.

But lately, you’d been feeling everyone’s eyes on you and, naturally, your instinctive reaction was to flee. Really, this had to be inherent; you wondered if your brother shared a similar flight-or-flight-never-fight response when confronted with an uncomfortable situation.

And still, you forced yourself to wait.

Following your conversation with Seokjin, you decided on the key points that you needed to discuss with Jungkook. And they were simple: share your thoughts with him and make a decision together.

You’ve never really tried this with him before; open communication was a recent development for the two of you. But you meant what you told Seokjin: a relationship involved two people. And regardless of what -ship you and Jungkook were currently in, your decisions still influenced his, and his influenced yours.

You had hoped to speak to him after he returned from his interview, but it was almost funny how time worked against you today.

After the band returned, you went to help Jungkook with his bandages, and the company executives decided to respond to your email with a phone call. And so, you were forced to stay on the phone with the label the whole time before Rated Riot went on stage.

That was okay. You figured you would talk to Jungkook later.

But later just wouldn’t come.

After the concert, you waited for the band to finish taking pictures with their fans before you took them to another interview with several more radio hosts. And when you returned to the bus, the curtains on Jungkook’s bunk were drawn. You didn’t want to wake him in case he was asleep.

The only time you finally had direct contact with Jungkook was on the plane to London. He surprised you by approaching you from behind and casually lifting your carry-on to the overhead compartment. Then, as though he hadn’t done anything out of the ordinary, he turned around to return to his seat.

“Wait,” you called out. “Can I—can we talk? Yoongi said he’d switch seats with me.”

Jungkook stopped, his stomach sinking. He was the undefeated champion of misinterpreting situations—he hadn’t forgotten how your conversation had ended last night, but he still thought this was about Sid.

Because while you were beating yourself up about your avoidant tendencies, Jungkook was grappling with a different problem.

Since this morning, he had been bombarded with incessant text messages from an unknown number that ranged from vaguely bothersome (“UR SO DUMB LMSAO”) to genuinely threatening (“DNOT THINK THS IS OVER YOU FUCKVING CUNT”). All texts contained a certain distinctiveness: full capitalisation, typos, and a disturbing scent of wounded ego.

It was Sid, Jungkook was absolutely sure of it.

He seemed to be in a white powder induced frenzy, which wasn’t particularly unusual—Jungkook didn’t think he could remember the last time Sid had been completely sober—but the frequency of the texts was a little unsettling. Jungkook thought the bet was over now, even if Sid wasn’t satisfied. But clearly, Sid was craving something more.

Jungkook wasn’t sure how you would know about this or why you would bring it up now, but he felt his phone vibrating in his pocket again, and he thought this had to be the reason why.

“Sure,” he said, trying to mask his apprehension. He turned on airplane mode on his phone and looked up. “What’s, uh—what’s going on?”

You gestured at his seat. He sat down with bated breath—as if his life was about to change and he needed to brace for it—and waited for you to settle beside him.

“I wanted to, uh, explain myself,” you began as the plane filled. The rhythmic sound of people shuffling across the aisle was oddly soothing. Jungkook, however, appeared perplexed. “And to thank you, actually. For being there when I—well, when all of that happened. I’m sorry I caused—”

“You’ve already thanked me,” he interjected. “And you better not tell me that you’re apologising for fainting right now.”

“I’m—well, I’m just saying, you were right,” you said, disheartened by the disbelief in his eyes. You placed your water bottle on the fold-out tray and shifted in your seat. “I should have known better. Rested more. I guess what I’m saying is that I’m sorry I didn’t listen, and it all led to... that.”

He sighed. This wasn’t about Sid; this was about something worse.

“That’s who you are, though,” he said. He should have known this would be something you would blame yourself for once you recovered. “You always have to get everything done, or you—you can’t sleep. You need to, uh, work on that, but you don’t need to apologise for it.”

You looked down, tracing a shaky finger over the armrest between your seats.

“And,” he added before you could speak, “to be fair, a lot of things that happened on tour were actually out of your control. You had no choice but to put in extra time and effort, I guess. The stage constructions collapsed, the venue was flooded—”

“Right, but these—well, anyway,” you cut yourself off, reverting to your original train of thought. “I’m sorry you had to drop everything a-and worry about me. Well, not just you; the whole thing ended up being a big scene that disrupted everyone. But I—I wanted to say this to you, first of all.”

He observed you for a long moment. Between the truce you’ve decided on in your hotel room, the conversation he’d overheard about your meeting with Nick, and the disturbing messages from an unknown number, Jungkook was having a hard time comprehending what he’d done to warrant an apology from you right now.

Then, a troubling thought occurred to him: what if this was your way of saying goodbye?

He had let you go last night. What if you had decided to leave, and this was the prelude to the end of your time together?

“I’m—I didn’t have to do it,” he said. “I did it because I—well, I mean, you were passed out. Of course, I wanted to make sure you were okay.” He leaned forward in his seat. “It kind of sounds like you’re forgetting that you’re not just the manager here. You’re also my—uh, y-you’re our friend. We all would have acted the same way if it had been anyone else. It’s an ‘all for one, and one for all’ situation with us. You know that.”

He was right; your team had grown so close that none of you would have hesitated to help each other. Your unease simply stemmed from the fact that you were the one receiving help this time.

You swallowed. You thought you owed him an explanation about everything, but you haven’t even really gotten to it yet.

“Thank you,” you said. “For what you said and—and for what you did. I’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

He gave you a hesitant smile. “Was I really so terrible at taking care of you that it made you change your workaholic ways?”

You raised your eyebrows, surprised by the gentle teasing in his words.

“No, you di—you were great. Except for the fact that you didn’t need to do that,” you said, shooting him a look that he promptly rolled his eyes at. You added, “I say that with gratitude, of course. But, um, I felt very uncomfortable just lying there while everyone else—well, can’t let that happen again. Anyway, this isn’t—”

“I hope it won’t happen again,” he interrupted. “But it’s—well, you’ve spent your whole life taking care of... everything. Your brother, your mum, uh, e-even me. It’s second nature to you, I don’t know how else to—you can’t help but actively try to fix things. So, I-I don’t mind being the person who reminds you to take it easy sometimes. I just want you to listen.”

He’d said something very similar to you last night and you dug your teeth into your lower lip so you wouldn’t argue.

You thought you weren’t doing a very good job of fixing things—nevermind that you’ve subconsciously turned absolutely everything around you into your personal responsibility, and it was simply unrealistic to take care of it all.

“Thank you,” you chose to say. “I just, um—I don’t want you to think I’m talking to you so you’d make me feel better. You don’t need to do that. And it’s my turn to expla—”

He whipped his head to look at you so suddenly—an almost offended expression on his face—that the rest of your sentence got caught in your throat.

“Wh—why do you always think that?” he asked. “That I do something for you because I feel like I have to?”

“I don’t—I know you’re not—ah.” Leaning back in your seat, you attempted to rearrange your thoughts as if you were shuffling stubborn cards in a deck—trying to find the one you needed to win a game against yourself. “That’s not even the main thing I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Okay,” he said, a little worried. “What is the main thing?”

It took you a moment to find your breath.

“The conversation that we had last night—well, not just last night, actually, it’s been happening for a while. But, uh, last night specifically—it wasn’t supposed to end like that,” you said. He lowered his eyes. “That’s what I wanted to, um—to bring up. Because we’re not talking again, you know? I mean—okay. That’s not true. You are talking. But I’m not. I-I think it’s still new to me that we’re—that we’re actually talking about things. About everything. I’m sorry I haven’t said much to you in return.”

You exhaled when you finished speaking—finished stammering, really—but you didn’t feel relieved. There was a lot more you had to say.

Jungkook, on the other hand, felt his thoughts drift back to Amsterdam once again, when he had entered your hotel room to apologise, and you told him you forgave him and apologised in return. He remembered the pained, laboured beating of his heart as he listened to you—thinking, all the while, that he had no right to want you all for himself.

Now, he had some additional time to think about how to respond, because the flight attendant started the safety demonstration at the front of the plane, preparing for take-off.

He fastened his seatbelt, relieved by the silence on his phone—but the quiet pause between you as the plane lifted off the runway felt very loud in his head.

“You know,” he said after a few minutes, “you find the weirdest things to feel guilty about.”

You furrowed your brows while Jungkook idly twirled the onyx signet ring on his index finger.

“You’re never obligated to respond to what I tell you,” he said. “I didn’t say any of those things to you in Manchester in exchange for your immediate forgiveness, or for some similar stories, or for—anything, really. You don’t owe me anything. I just wanted to tell you everything, and that’s it.”

“I-I get that,” you shifted in your seat, restricted by the seatbelt, “but I’m your manager. And I-I left you in a confusing, stressful situation by yourself when I refused to talk to you right away. That was—it was unprofessional at best, and cruel at—”

“You’re more than that to me, though,” he cut in. You gripped the armrest tighter. “You know that. And you didn’t… leave me in that situation as my manager. You left me there as my ex-girlfriend. You have that right. You were confused and stressed, too.”

Your gaze slid over his black and grey flannel and the t-shirt with a Rated Riot logo underneath. The plane cruised at the designated altitude, but you still felt pushed into your seat like you had during take-off.

“I don’t—I’m not sure those two roles can be separated any longer,” you admitted.

Oh, whispered an alarmed pang of his heart. And, oh? echoed the multitude of shivers rippling underneath his skin.

“What are you saying?” he asked.

You drew in a breath. You didn’t want to start from the beginning because you had a feeling that he might not let you get to the end, so you decided to start from the explanation—the one that you’d come here to give him, but kept getting sidetracked as he responded to you in ways you weren’t anticipating.

“People on tour,” you began, “are very invested in our, uh—situation.”

Jungkook arched an eyebrow. “They’re invested?”

“Apparently, we’re a popular topic backstage.”

Quickly enough, he thought he figured out your implication: if he hadn’t played along with Sid, the staff on this tour might have been having very different conversations.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“No, that’s not—well, it’s not just your fault,” you replied. “It takes two, right?”

“Right, but I was the one who made the bet.”

“You—okay. But this isn’t about the bet—” you paused. Reconsidered. “Well, alright, the bet sort of kick-started a lot of things, but it’s not—that’s not the problem from my point of view right now.”

Oh, once more. And then, ah.

You were talking, he realised, about the things you didn’t want to talk about in your hotel room in Manchester. The things you’ve affectionately labelled as “a confusing, stressful situation.” The things you were supposed to discuss later, when the time was right. Except he had succumbed to the terminal case of nothing-matters-anymore-if-you’re-leaving-the-band and got drunk instead.

“Okay,” he said. “That’s… fine with me.”

“Alright,” you said. “So, here’s our problem: I’m your manager.”

Jungkook raised his eyebrows and pulled his chin back.

“If that’s our only problem,” he said, “we are very lucky people.”

A brief smile flickered on your face.

“It’s our biggest problem,” you clarified. “But we definitely are lucky.”

Encouraged by the amusement in your eyes, he grinned. “Because we have each other?”

Your smile grew and even the plane itself seemed to shake a little when his heart rate accelerated at the sight of it.

“Because we can solve this problem,” you said.

His face fell. He thought he could guess where you were going with this.

“How do you mean?” he still asked, his voice a low murmur.

You thought you could have used some of the whiskey that Jungkook had sought out last night.

With a measured breath, you said, “I leave the band, and—”

“Wait,” he cut you off. “Is that supposed to be—”

“Hear me out first—”

“No, listen—if the problem is that you’re my manager,” he said, “then you leaving Rated Riot is not the solution.”

Jungkook sounded a little like Seokjin had earlier—a stark contrast from the way he’d spoken to you last night by the bus.

“Are you suggesting that because people are talking about us backstage?” he pressed.

You turned away. “It’s not just that. I mean, they’re already talking and that’s—well, it’s not great. But we can’t stop the wheel from turning now, or however that saying goes. What we can do, however, is stop it before it gets worse. And by that I mean, you know—we need to decide what the hell we’re doing.”

That was what he wanted, he thought. But now he was confused.

You seemed to want to make a decision about your relationship together. Yet you also seemed to believe that leaving Rated Riot was the best option. He failed to see how both of these things were possible at the same time.

“So, you’ve made up your mind, then?” he asked. “About leaving?”

“That’s what I want to talk to you about,” you said. “I don’t want to leave the band, but—”

“Well, that’s the thing, then,” he said sharply, unfastening his seatbelt. Turning to face you, he stumbled over his own confusion, “I’m—I don’t want to hold you back. I told you. But I thought you—I thought it would be—I thought you wanted to leave. I thought—but you want to stay. So, stay.”

Stay.

It was very simple, really, very concise. But it carried a lot more weight than his words last night when he had caught you off guard. When he had let you go.

You wanted to stay. You just didn’t think you should.

Your response wasn’t particularly verbal. “Hmm.”

“Is it me?” Jungkook asked. “Am I the only reason you’re thinking of leaving?”

He didn’t sound accusatory, even though you were prepared for it. He sounded apologetic instead—almost guilty—and you were completely unprepared for that as a million tiny needles pricked at your heart.

“You’re not the only reason,” you replied. “You’re part of it. And I don’t—look, I-I don’t want to leave. But that sounds reasonable when you look at where we are right now.”

He heard nothing of what you’d said.

“That’s not reasonable in the slightest,” he insisted.

“Jungkook—”

“You have to stay. If you—”

“But if that’s the choice that would make more sense for us,” you interjected, exasperated, “then I don’t mind leaving. If—if we weren’t working together anymore, then maybe we could try to finally figure our shit out.”

Now he heard it.

He had a vague awareness that the other passengers behind you had turned off their screens and removed their headphones, choosing to listen to your conversation instead. But he was too stunned by the look in your eyes to care.

So, that was what you were trying to say: you were prepared to leave Rated Riot to fix your relationship.

He opened his mouth to speak, but it took another minute for coherent words to come to him.

“We can—we can figure our shit out while working together,” he said. “Why do you have to leave?”

“It’s—you have to understand,” you said, “that I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m pretty sure neither do you, but that’s how you usually function.” Jungkook sobered up enough to offer a noncommittal shrug. You continued, “but for me—this is freaking me out. I don’t—I don’t know what’s going to happen and what we should do, and—leaving the band sounds—it seems reasonable. It seems safe. Smart. And that’s what I’m clinging to.”

He swallowed, not trusting himself to move. “But that’s—”

“Please, it’s—this is what I wanted to say to you—what I should have said to you last night.” There was a pleading tone in your voice. He nodded, quiet while you continued. “If I stay with Rated Riot, and we try to solve our problems… there are only two ways that can go, right? We both know as much. Either we get back together, or we don’t.”

Jungkook was mesmerised by how glaringly simple this was, in principle: either you used a label on your relationship, or you didn’t.

He knew he was going to love you either way, but he couldn’t breathe, suddenly, at the thought of this other choice in this dilemma—the choice where you didn’t get back together, and he spent the rest of his life deliberately going crazy, so he could return—at least in his mind—to that day seven years ago when he first met you.

“Well, uh, yeah,” he managed to say. “That’s pretty much the choices that we’ve got.”

You reclined in your seat, lifting your gaze to the light control buttons overhead.

“If we get back together…” you began, exhaling. “Then, we might have to face a lot of problems from the label. But we might be alright in the end. I don’t know.”

Jungkook tightened his jaw. He attempted to formulate a response that would be logical and appropriate in this situation. But really, his head felt too small for his thoughts and his tongue too big for his mouth.

“That’s… that’s good to know,” he eventually said.

“Mhmm,” you replied distractedly. “But see, what if we don’t get back together? Or we do, but it doesn’t work out?”

That was what worried him, too—but for different reasons.

He knew that you were looking at this from a pragmatic perspective. A logical, what-would-make-more-sense perspective.

He didn’t think he’d ever looked at it this way. For him, this was simple: he loved you and wanted to be with you. He didn’t care how inconvenient and illogical it might seem to those around him, and he refused to think about what would happen if this love didn’t work out. It would have to. How could it not?

But he recognised his privileges; he knew he didn’t have as many responsibilities as you did. And, alright, fine, he thought about it—realistically, if you broke up again, he’d probably drink until he turned into a puddle of whiskey, while you’d flee across the globe to get away from it all.

And yet—was that all there was to this? Just rationality and calculated decisions?

Jungkook cleared his throat and asked the question that he believed really mattered here.

“Do you love me?”

Someone on the plane gulped audibly and held their breath. He wondered if it was him.

The colour of your eyes deepened, then blurred. “I-I—that’s—that’s not—”

“Answer me,” he whispered.

You tried, but no words came out. This moment resembled the nightmares that haunted you lately: you opened your mouth to scream, but silence stifled every sound you tried to make.

“T-that’s—” you began and stopped yourself before you could stutter any further. You took a breath. “That’s not important right now—”

“How can it not be—”

“Because I do love you,” you said quickly—the words slurred into one desperate Idoloveyou, a hopeless Idoloveyou, a how-can-you-possibly-expect-me-not-to Idoloveyou. “But I don’t think I should. I don’t think you should, either. We’re a—we’re a fucking mess.”

Visibly frozen, Jungkook found himself thinking that if this was the sixteenth century, and the two of you just happened to have this conversation in some public square, the townsfolk would have surely accused you of witchcraft.

It was uncanny, the way you cast a spell on him with just four words—all four of which he heard with perfect clarity: I do love you. Granted, he wasn’t sure if he heard the rest. He felt like he was already burning in your place.

“Right,” he thought he said. He couldn’t feel his face. “But we’ve always—”

“I’m—I have to—I do owe you,” you said. He watched you, his expression oscillating between mild confusion and outright bewilderment. “You said I don’t, but I do. I could have told you what was going on in my head like you told me. Honestly, all this time, whenever I talked to people, they all told me to speak to you. To talk it out. And I closed up in my head instead. If I don’t talk about it, I don’t have to deal with it. You know?”

He blinked, finally. “That’s—”

“I’ll explain it, though, okay?” you said. “Please?”

You gave him too much power—as if he could ever say no to you. As if he could stop listening. As if every fibre of his being didn’t ache to stay close to you.

Warm—so unbearably warm that it felt like he was in the middle of exploring the landscapes Dante depicted in Inferno—Jungkook wiped off the sweat from his palms on his dark jeans.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, okay.”

“It won’t take long,” you assured. “Really, I don’t even have much to say. I’m fucking scared. That’s all there is to it.”

Jungkook seemed to be practising the lost art of swallowing his tongue. He wanted you to continue and you were biting your lip in a way that suggested that this was not all there was to it. You only wished it was.

You took a trembling breath, and your lungs followed—quivering, it seemed, as they tried to provide you with the oxygen necessary for all that you were about to say.

“I spent the first fifteen years of my life watching my parents break up and get back together again,” you began. “And do you know what I felt every single time they broke up? Actual rage.” You laughed wryly here like this reaction was absurd. “But when they got back together, I was fucking—I was hopeful. I refused to speak to them, of course—I was a teenager—but I was… Inside, just like my mum, I also hoped that this would work. That this time would be the one.”

You swallowed and lapsed into a silence so long and heavy that Jungkook worried you might never speak again.

Fifteen years, he thought. And all this time, he’d assumed that your dad left for the final time when you were twelve. That was already bad enough, of course, but Jungkook hadn’t realised that the back-and-forth between your parents that you’d mentioned back in Tilburg had taken place after that. He hadn’t realised that you and your brother had gone through three years of almost having a father—and your mum through almost having a partner.

“I knew they were a tragedy together,” you continued. Jungkook didn’t know how to raise his eyes to look at you. “It was obvious that it wouldn’t last. I always knew it, and I always said that to my mum. But deep down, I still fucking hoped that they’d get together and it would work.”

You shook your head with a cold, unforgiving smile.

“How fucking stupid,” you concluded. “All hope does is bring misery and disappointment.”

“You were a child,” he said, his brows drawn together—sad and a little scared for your younger self. “You just wanted your parents to be together. You wanted a family.”

“Yeah,” you said with a sigh. Then again, “yeah.”

A minute passed without either of you speaking. Flight attendants crossed the aisles, offering complimentary snacks, but missing you—either by mistake or because there was no one in your seats on the plane. The two of you were somewhere else.

“I think,” you said once the commotion around you quieted, “that I wasn’t just angry at my mum for trying again and again, even though it never worked. Or for never losing hope that maybe they could be happy together. I think I was also angry at myself. Because I never truly lost hope, either.”

Jungkook hung his head, his lips tight in silent contemplation.

“So that’s what I’m afraid of,” you said. “I’m scared that this—us—will turn out to be like that. I’m scared that we’ll let wishful thinking take over, and we’ll get back together even though we shouldn’t. Even though it’s obvious that we won’t last.”

Right away, he wanted to insist that you would defy those odds. That there was nothing obvious about the two of you whatsoever. He wanted to promise all that and more, but it wasn’t right—not after you endured fifteen years of broken promises between two of the most important people in your life.

“You, um—” he started to say and coughed suddenly, caught off guard by his dry throat, “—you told me before that you admired your mum’s courage. F-for trying again.”

You handed him the overpriced airport water bottle that you had bought earlier. Jungkook nodded in gratitude.

“I did,” you confirmed. “And I do admire that about her. But I don’t have any of her courage.” You brought a shaky finger over your forehead, not quite scratching it. “I always say that I don’t believe in second chances, but the truth is, I think I do believe in them. I’m just debilitated by my fear that these second chances might not work out.”

Jungkook lowered the bottle. He’d emptied almost half of it in a single gulp, but an anxious undercurrent inside of him had absorbed it before he could feel any relief.

“Is that, um,” he tried to ask, “is that something you feel in general or—or because it’s us?”

You thought about that for half a second and shook your head.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been in a situation where a second chance held so much significance,” you said. “This isn’t a mistake that you can fix. It’s not a human error. It’s you and me. And it’s so—it’s final. There won’t be another chance for us, it’s now or never. And what if it’s never?”

You lowered your gaze, your fingers restless as they toyed with the sleeves of your black shirt. Every now and then, you’d lift your hand to your bare neck—you still hadn’t found any of your necklaces—as if seeking a distraction from the weight of the moment.

“Y-you are—you’re my—” you tried and couldn’t. Finally, you looked at him, and the words you couldn’t voice were right there, shimmering uncertainly in his dark eyes. “You’re my first thought in the morning and the last one at night. I don’t think my heart could take it if I started to have hope for us again, but we didn’t work out in the end.”

Jungkook felt his heart trip over several beats—

Stumble down his ribs—

Crash into his stomach—

Roll around the hollow cavities somewhere at the very bottom—

Rise suddenly, all the way back to his chest—

Expand—

Expand—

Expand—

And explode, it seemed. In a flash of light so vivid and intense that for a minute or two, his blood stopped running and he survived on nothing but the words you’d just said.

“And so that’s what I meant,” you finished, and he struggled to hear your next words over the loud pounding in his chest. “If I stay here and we don’t get back together—or we do, but not for long—then what? We see each other every day, we try to act like nothing’s wrong, we learn how to go back to being professional, and then four years later, you make another bet?”

Jungkook found the end of your sentence so utterly unexpected that he wasn’t sure if he had even heard you correctly. His response was half of a gasp and a fractured “I—” before you cut him off.

“I’m joking,” you said with a gentle smile—one that managed to feel both, very fitting and completely out of place in this situation. “That’s—well, that is why I think it’d be more reasonable for me to leave. That way, I think, we could figure it out without some dramatic, tragic consequences in case it, uh—in case something goes wrong.”

“R-right,” he said. A warm haze settled on his face in a delicate shade of pink. It appeared almost soft to the touch. “I… I understand. I-I don’t—I don’t know if there’s anything I can say that would take that away. All of your fear.”

You swallowed and nodded. “Yeah. There might not be anything to say at all.”

Jungkook hurriedly ran his tongue over his lips. He wasn’t thinking about you leaving right now. He was thinking about you staying and fighting through it.

He wanted to say something more, but he didn’t think he could mend these particular wounds in your heart. They ran deeper than his love could reach.

It wasn’t him that you should have talked to about this. It wasn’t him that could help you reach an agreement—or, at least, an understanding—with your own self.

“You should talk to your mum,” he said.

You looked up from the floor of the plane, surprised. “What?”

“Talk to her,” he repeated. “Just to hear what she thinks about everything. To hear her reasoning. To understand why she made the choices that she did. I think that would be good for you both.”

Your surprise deepened and gained an edge. You looked alarmed, as if the notion that a caregiver could ease your hurt rather than deepen it was new and foreign.

“I’ve—we’ve never—my mum and I have only talked about her relationship with my dad maybe once in our whole lives,” you said. “I have never even talked to her about my own relationship. You know I haven’t.”

He nodded solemnly. “I have, though.”

“What?” you asked. There was a ringing in your ears. “You have—you’ve talked to—to my mum? About—”

“I’m sure she’ll tell you everything.”

For a good minute, you watched him with an expression that held more questions than possible ways of asking them.

“I—I’m very confused right now,” you managed.

He nodded again, understanding, but still not offering any explanations.

He’d told you most of everything, really—he’d called those bits of the story “Haunting” and “Cursed.” But the rest of it had to be something you pieced together on your own.

For a long time, he had imagined this to be something that would hit you years later, perhaps when you would accidentally hear an old Rated Riot song. You’d think no, it can’t be, and you’d rush home. You’d pull out the albums, the track lists, and the lyrics.

And you’d know.

These conversations with your mum were his far side of the moon—invisible, but still present, still heavy.

These conversations were his thoughts and hopes and countless fears.

They were everything he brought to Rated Riot and everything he expressed in the recording booth, in Namjoon’s studio, and on stage.

They were his past and his present, and someone else’s future.

They were him without you, but still searching for you every morning when he woke up.

They were you, you, you.

Everything he’d ever talked to your mum about had been his songs. And all his songs had always been a tale about you—in every banal, every impossible narrative he could find within himself.

They were about seeing you and growing wings.

About kissing you and coming home.

About losing you and bleeding out.

About forever and five minutes that don’t mean anything once they’re over.

“I’m sorry,” he said, not capable of much else. “I needed her help with something. I didn’t really tell her anything, uh, directly, so to speak. But she—she knows. She’ll tell you everything. It’s just, um—you have to talk to her, too. You have to tell her what you told me.”

Airplanes, you realised suddenly, made it very easy to force yourself to stop running away. There was nowhere to escape—you could see the clouds reflected in his eyes and you were already falling in them anyway.

“I’ll talk to her,” you said.

Jungkook gave you a small nod and scratched his knee absentmindedly.

“I want you to stay,” he stated. “With the band. It’s—it’s selfish, but it’s the truth. I’ve always tried to encourage you to stop thinking so much a-and just do what you wanted, and this—this is what you want, despite your fear. You want to stay.”

You looked at him with a forlorn expression and he felt his hands twitch at his sides.

“But what will we do?” you asked.

“We’ll figure it out,” he promised. “I mean, we’ve gotten this far, right? So, give us a chance. We’re not completely hopeless. We can... talk our way through it all, step by step.”

You’ve talked your way through a lot and you have gotten this far, that was true. Even if the journey hadn’t been pleasant.

Seokjin had told you earlier today that as long as you stayed with the band, no one would care about what happened next. And, really, no matter how you looked at it, this was what it all boiled down to: it was just you.

Only you—afraid of what others will say, afraid of getting hurt and hurting him again, afraid of doing too much, and afraid of not doing enough.

“I’m—” you tried, “w-we don’t know what will happen. That’s why I’m—”

“I know,” he said. “And you’re right. We don’t know what will happen. That’s fucking terrifying. I’m scared, too.”

He did look a little scared, but he licked his lips and successfully collected himself.

The two of you were so close to meeting in the middle and taking that first step together—just a little more strain between your shaking, outstretched hands.

“And I-I know that the bet is another thing that—that might make it harder for you to believe that we can—that we can work it out,” he added, spinning his ring around his finger twice more. “But I want you to know that it—the bet was a fucked up thing to do. But it gave me a reason to talk to you about everything that I already wanted to talk to you about. I’m—even without the bet, I would have approached you, eventually. It just—I was fucking scared, so it might have taken me longer.”

It wasn’t just you.

Fear was in the epicentre of everything you were saying to each other. It was like the wind in every city you visited on this tour—inescapable, uncontrollable, persistent.

He was afraid, too—of trying and failing. Afraid of getting his heart broken and breaking yours. Afraid of never finding the forever that he desperately wanted with you.

“My point is,” Jungkook finished, “I think this is inevitable, because—well, let’s be honest,” he chuckled softly, trying to lessen the gravity of his confession, “all I’d ever wanted in my entire fucked-up life was you.”

Your breath trembled.

Something very deep inside of you wanted you to believe that inevitability was meant for the two of you, too.

“It’s been four years, though,” you said with a faint shake of your head. “What if it takes us another four to find a way to make this work?”

“It—well, I don’t really care how long it takes, to be honest,” he said. “I’m going to die yours.”

He said that and your heart stopped beating for a moment to listen.

To wait.

To make one thing very clear for you: you would never survive losing him again.

And you were scared—completely petrified—to find yourself in a situation where losing him was possible. Where it was likely.

Jungkook saw it on your face. He saw everything—the anguish, the pain, the doubt, the fear.

But he felt a little exhilarated to find the fight in your eyes, too. This fight was the reason you were talking to him about things that you’ve never talked about. It was the reason you were here.

“We’ll decide everything else when the idea of—of trying again doesn’t scare you so much anymore,” he said, keeping his voice steady. “When you hear your mum’s point of view, and you can make a, uh—an informed decision.”

He noted that there was something softer in your eyes when you looked at him again, but he could still discern the lingering edges of doubt.

“You think that’ll help me make an informed decision?” you asked, touched by his choice of words.

“I hope it will,” he replied. “But we can work it all out, either way. I just think you need to talk to her. It’s been so long.”

“Right. It has been.” You clasped your hands around your neck and tucked your chin between your palms. “It—it probably won’t be an easy conversation, though.”

“Nor will it be short, I imagine.”

“Hmm. Probably not.”

He sensed the growing distance between you as your eyes ran over the back of the seat in front of you. He knew you well enough to understand what you were doing: you were mapping out the rest of your story in your head.

He didn’t like that. Your stories rarely had happy endings.

“You don’t—don’t start planning it ahead, though,” he said hastily—before you reached the unhappily ever after in your mind. “It’ll be late when we land in London. You need to sleep. Talk to her after that. When you—when you’re not working. We can wait. We have time.”

Finally, you allowed your gazes to meet again—and to linger a little longer this time.

You took a moment to note that, despite knowing Jungkook for so long, every time you looked at him, you still needed a minute to will yourself to keep breathing. You remembered thinking, after your first few dates, if that would ever go away—logically, it should have.

But you watched him now, seven years since you’ve met, and the beating of your heart still felt backwards.

I’m going to die yours

I’m going to die yours

I’m going to die—

“Okay,” you finally said. “I’ll call her as soon as possible.”

He nodded twice and closed his eyes for a brief respite—but hesitated, suddenly, before opening them again.

He wondered, for a suspended moment, what it would mean for you—this ‘as soon as possible.’

Then he looked at you and decided to tell you what he wanted it to mean.

“Before that happens, though—before you talk to her, I mean—I-I want to still be able to see you,” he said and did so assertively, using the phrase I want, but really meaning, I must. “I don’t want to not talk to you.”

You felt your frosty expression crumble effortlessly into a soft smile.

“We’ve agreed to a truce, right?” you said easily. Lightly.

His heart soared.

He was smiling, too, but with caution—his lips were pressed together as he bit into his lip ring to contain his smile to a level that he thought appropriate.

His shining eyes gave him away, however, and you wondered—the thought sudden and overwhelming—if there was a point in your life when you weren’t in love with him when he smiled.

“Let’s try a friendship,” he proposed.

“Oh—” Your smile abruptly turned into laughter as you remembered trying this once before. It had lasted for about two days. “You know we can’t be friends. We don’t know how.”

The gentle cadence of your laughter made him weightless.

“What are you talking about?” he teased—so high that he was certain the flight attendants were going to ask him to take it down a notch because it was dangerous to float on the ceiling in the middle of a flight. “We can be whatever the fuck we want to be.”

Your laughter grew bolder, strengthened by the relief that you’ve had this conversation, that you’ve decided on your next steps, however uncertain they were—and his smile spread.

You could see him beaming through your half-closed eyes, and there was absolutely nothing—no matter how big or small, significant or not at all—that you wouldn’t have done for him when he looked like that, and no amount of fear could have stopped you.

He'd burn down half of Europe for you, Seokjin had said.

You were worried you’d burn all of it for him.

“Honestly,” you said, “we’re such a mess that I have nothing else to say. Sure. Let’s try being friends again. Why not?”

“For the time being?” Jungkook asked. There was a tentative glint in his eyes. “Until we figure out if—until we decide what we’re going to do with us?”

It was very considerate of him to say ‘we’ here, when you knew that you were the one who needed to get it together in the end.

“For the time being,” you confirmed.

“And you’ll stay?” he asked once more. “With Rated Riot?”

Last night, he had told you he was letting you go, and you needed to hear it—not just to see how much he’s grown, but to fully understand yourself. To stop jumping from possibility to possibility. To accept that it was okay to do what you wanted sometimes.

The past few days were like flipping a coin and realising, while it was mid-air, which side you were hoping it would land on.

“I’ll stay.”

Jungkook thought that this flight was going to be the most thrilling part of his day. But a miracle happened as soon as the plane touched down in London.

His grandmother called him.

It wasn’t an accident like he had initially assumed when he saw her name on his phone. She called because she missed her favourite grandson and wanted to wish him good luck at his concert (and chastise him a little for not wearing “enough clothing” on stage).

Jungkook wasn’t sure if the tears in his eyes were because she’d remembered who he was, remembered what he did for a living, because she’d called, or because she’d confirmed his long-held suspicion that he was her favourite grandson.

Perhaps, and most likely, it was all of these things.

He was so excited that he stared at his phone even after the call had ended, ignoring the influx of more unintelligible, frantic messages from the same unknown number. He probably would have spent the rest of the night fixated on the screen if his battery hadn’t run out by the time everyone settled in the hotel.

At that point, there was nothing Jungkook wanted more than to tell you about the fifteen-minute phone call. However, he couldn’t call or text with his phone off—and waiting for ten minutes until he found the charger in his suitcase seemed like half of an eternity.

Unaware of the lateness of the hour, he lingered outside the hotel, thinking of a plan.

In the end, he decided he didn’t want to draw more attention to your friendship—he hiccupped on the word even in his thoughts—and approached the decorative garden at the front entrance. Ficus plants (artificial, as it turned out) rested in a bed of pebbles (real, for some reason) and Jungkook grabbed a handful of those before heading back to the south wing of the hotel.

He counted down the windows until he identified yours, then took half a dozen steps back from the wall and tossed a pebble at your window. It hit the glass with a gentle thud and dropped onto the grass four floors below.

Jungkook waited for a minute—or what felt like a minute—and tossed another one, making this one bounce against your windowsill before it slipped into your room through the crack of the open window.

He waited again and, finally, your curtains fluttered. A moment later, he saw your puzzled face as you opened the window and covered your squinting eyes with your hand, peering down into the darkness.

“Jungkook?” you called out. “What—what the fuck are you doing?”

“Trying to get your attention!” he shouted with an elated lilt in his voice.

You picked up the pebble from the windowsill and lifted it. He couldn’t see it very well from the ground, but he could see your confused expression.

“By throwing rocks at my window?”

“Yeah!”

“How—are you—for what—”

You stopped. There wasn’t a singular question you wanted to ask, because nothing about what he was doing made any sense whatsoever.

You leaned over the windowsill to get a better look at him, but it didn’t help much. The light from your hotel room made it difficult to discern his expression in the pitch-black night. And the garden lights adorning the exterior of the hotel only highlighted his white sneakers.

“I’m sure there were a lot of steps you could have taken before you had to resort to this,” you shouted into the night. “Most people text. Or knock on the door.”

“My phone’s dead,” he explained, lifting a black block that you assumed was the dead phone. “And I didn’t want anyone to see me going into your room. Can you come down here?”

“Wh—hold on a second.” You retreated into the room to put on a robe over the t-shirt you had worn to bed. The night wind felt a little less frigid when you leaned out of the window again. “Can you just come up here? It’s nearly six in the morning, no one will see—”

“Come on, we finally have a few days off!” he shouted, implying, clearly, that you’d have time to catch up on sleep later. After days of him forcing you to rest, this was very unusual—but, really, quite welcome.

You realised that something important must have happened for him to do this. However, his buoyant voice—and this whole situation in general—also made you wonder if he was drunk.

“I meant that it’s cold outside,” you said. “Wouldn’t it be warmer to—”

“I can—it’s not that bad,” he ended up saying after quickly surmising that his offer to warm you might lead to you throwing that same pebble right at his forehead. “Please?”

You were well aware that this could go on for a while, and it probably wouldn’t be long before your Romeo-and-Juliet-esque conversation attracted the attention of the hotel staff, who would politely ask you to find a different accommodation. The manager already didn’t seem especially pleased when he found out that a rock band would be staying at his hotel.

“Alright. I’m coming down,” you said. “Put the rocks back where you found them.”

He snickered and watched you close the window, disappearing inside of your room.

By the time he returned the remaining pebbles back to the garden, the sky was already beginning to paint itself red. The clouds obscured the rising sun, but Jungkook turned his head just in time to see you walk through the hotel door, and he felt like it was the middle of the day already.

“What’s going on?” you asked, a little concerned about the size of the grin on his face.

“My grandma called me,” he said. “She’s having a good day. She remembered me.”

“Oh, my God!” you gasped. All of your irritation about leaving your warm hotel room at this hour vanished in an instant. “That’s great news! Did you talk to her?”

“Yeah!” He nodded, nearly laughing in pure, beautiful euphoria. “The whole call, she was okay. Even scolded me for breaking the glass on her favourite picture frame when I came to say goodbye to her on the last night before the tour.”

You laughed, infected with his bright mood. “Jungkook, that’s—that’s fantastic. I’m so—”

Instinctively, he pulled you to him by wrapping his arms around your waist. For just a moment, he tightened his embrace and lifted you up slightly, laughing breathlessly when you gasped in surprise.

“I know,” he murmured into your neck as he lowered you to the ground. “I still can’t believe she really called.”

He held you close to him with one hand around your waist, and another one on the back of your neck—and you were stunned for a split-second. Then finally, muscle memory roused you, and you wrapped your arms around his neck, resting the side of your head against his.

“I’m—I’m so happy to hear that,” you whispered, feeling his breath on your shoulder and the goosebumps that rose on your skin as a result.

“I am, too.” He slowly pulled his head back to look at you, and the sight of the smile on his face was enough to pierce your heart with something that you could never remove. “You’re the first person I wanted to tell this to.”

Wordlessly, you pulled him back into a hug. You could feel the stretch of his cheeks against yours as his smile widened, and you realised you’d never want to run away from this. You’d always want to stay.

You were going to stay.

No. That wasn’t right.

You wouldn’t just stay with Rated Riot, determined to destroy every ounce of your fear for him. You’d have mopped up whole oceans for him. Captured shooting stars and stuffed them into jars. Flooded the entire world with an endless sea.

You’d have done anything to have him here like this: smiling so much that he could barely speak while his chest thud-thud-thudded against yours.

You felt so much of it—this vast love that refused to die no matter how much it was beaten—that you didn’t know what to do with it all.

A minute later, you pulled back slightly—a little dizzy from the intense whirlwinds inside your chest.

“T-thank you,” you stammered. “For telling me. I’m really—I’m so happy for you.”

His hands lingered on your waist, extending the moment to the very end.

“Thank you,” he replied, taking a reluctant step back. “She, um—she asked me to say hi to you. You know, from her.”

You were surprised that she remembered you—and brought you up!—and your smile returned, encouraged by the bashful look in his eyes when he said this.

“Give her my best the next time you talk to her,” you said.

“I will.” He nodded eagerly, then slowed down. “Although, I, uh—well—I don’t know when that’ll be.”

“That’s okay,” you replied quickly, not wanting to lose the lightness of the moment so soon. “The important thing is that she’s having a good day today. And she called you!”

You raised your voice at the end of the sentence, and it was enough to rekindle his excitement.

“She did!” he sang. “She said I was her favourite grandson, by the way. So I was right.”

“Oh—hmm.” You remembered pretending to argue with him about this in Stockholm and couldn’t help yourself. “Well, alright. I guess that makes sense. Remember that stray orange cat that she used to feed every night? Reginald?”

“Reggie,” he said, grinning. The cat was one of the first things his grandmother mentioned when she called tonight; it had stopped coming to see her, but continued to take up a large place in her heart. “What’s he got to do with this?”

“Well, I mean, she loved him so much, even though he scratched her every time she got too close,” you explained. “Clearly, she always had a soft spot for troublemakers.”

“Okay, now,”—he clicked his tongue—“my grandma did actually love that cat a lot, so I’ll take that as a compliment.”

You snickered and he laughed, too, and for a moment, he thought his chest might have exploded if he felt any happier than he did right now.

Then he noticed you clutching your robe closer to your body. Whatever you’d worn underneath wasn’t enough to keep you warm now that the initial excitement slowly began to fade.

“Do you, uh… want to go back inside?” he asked, gesturing at the exposed skin of your wrists. “You’re shivering.”

You looked down at your hands. “I’m okay. But maybe we could sit?”

You turned to look around. There was a bench right at the edge of the garden, next to a bronze-coloured flowerpot that was placed in the pebbles Jungkook had used to “get your attention”.

“Yeah,” he agreed.

You shivered all over again when he sat down next to you, and the bench turned out to be smaller than it had appeared. You could feel every bounce of his restless legs.

“So,” you said, “what did you two talk about?”

He brightened at your question, and suddenly, you didn’t think he was anywhere near close enough.

“Oh, so many things,” he said. “She told me she’d like to see us perform. Can we make that happen when we go back?”

“Absolutely,” you promised.

“Yeah?” His smile widened and his bouncing increased. “She’ll probably hate it. Mosh pits aren’t her thing.”

“We’ll put her in the balcony seats,” you suggested. This conversation felt so ordinary that it was hard to imagine you could be talking to him about anything else. “She’ll love every second of watching you on stage.”

“She said she saw pictures from the tour,” he added, giddy. “My cousins showed her Maggie’s Instagram profile.”

“Did she see your pirate cosplay?”

Jungkook displayed a remarkable resilience to the pirate jokes after that first concert—you and Jimin suspected that the response from the audience played a big part in his newfound immunity—and he chuckled at it now.

“She did,” he said. “She said I reminded her of Kurt Russell in Escape from New York.”

You pulled back a little to get a better look at him, even though he no longer needed to wear the eye patch. Most of the discolouration around his eye had already faded and you’d managed to cover up the scratches with a few smaller, skin-coloured adhesive pads.

“Well, shit,” you said. “Maybe I do kind of see the resemblance. You’ve got the hair.”

“I don’t know who that is,” he admitted.

You widened your eyes. “Jungkook. You don’t know Snake Plissken?”

“No, but my grandma said all her friends had a crush on him after the film came out,” he said. “Except for my grandma, of course. She insists she only ever had eyes for my grandpa.”

You both chuckled at this with a childlike glee—the thought of a love that spanned decades felt exhilarating and very possible as the sky awakened above you.

“My mum liked Kurt Russell, too, after the film,” you said. “And she was nine at the time. She snuck into the theatre with her brother and his friends.”

Jungkook inclined his head thoughtfully. “Maybe that guy’s not so bad, then.”

“He’s a classic,” you corrected. “But your taste in films isn’t.”

“That’s actually exactly what my grandma said,” he remembered. “She told me not to come home until I watched it.”

You could hear his grandmother saying this exact thing to him and felt yourself smile again.

“I think you’d love it if you watched it,” you said. “So, it’s not much of a threat.”

“Really?” He looked at you, but only for a fraction of a moment. “Would you—I mean, it’d be cool if we could—”

You knew what he was asking. And your response—like most of everything else tonight—came as a reflex. “I’m sure we can rent it on Amazon.”

“Okay,” he said, his shoulders slumping against yours in visible relief. “That—I’d like that.”

Unwelcome, the raw breeze of the late hour caught up with you, and you felt your body shudder involuntarily once more. Determined to ignore the chill, you opened your mouth to continue the conversation, but Jungkook suddenly leaned forwards.

“Here,” he said, slipping out of his dark flannel. “Put this on. It’s not much, but—”

“No, no—” you tried, but he drew closer to drape the flannel over your shoulders. “You’ll catch a cold.”

“I’ll be fine,” he insisted, pulling back. To further reduce the significance of the gesture, he added, “it’s what friends do. And I’m warm anyway.”

You clutched the collar of the flannel tighter to prevent it from sliding off. Or just to have something to do with your hands. “Well—thanks, friend.”

A powerful waft of his cologne permeated your senses, and you closed your eyes, preserving the refreshing blend of woody and citrus notes that already took up a significant amount of space in your memory.

Every time you inhaled, his scent mixed with a different moment from your life—and it all flooded your mind in an unstoppable sequence.

Meeting Jungkook—

Kissing him for the first time on that rainy night in the park—

Hugging him hello every morning before class—

Borrowing his clothes when you stayed at his dorm—

Losing your mind when you found yourself alone and his scent returned to you, uninvited.

Jungkook appeared to be sharing your memories in real time as he inhaled sharply and tapped his fingers against his shaky thighs.

“Friends,” he said, swallowing, “probably don’t kiss each other.”

His words ignited a fire in the pit of your stomach without any matches.

You glanced at him from the corner of your eye. “Yeah, uh—t-they probably don’t.”

“Hmm. Right.”

“As your friend,” you said, sitting up straighter and letting his flannel settle around your shoulders while you lowered your hands to the wooden bench underneath you, “I’m pointing out that you’re on a high because your grandma called. That’s why you’re thinking about—”

“I’m on a high because I’m with you,” he stated. “My friend.”

The fire inside you spread rapidly, wildly, uncontrollably.

The way you were starting to lose feeling in your fingers from gripping the bench so tightly, yet you refused to let go of it, should have probably been studied scientifically.

“Well, then,” you said, “let’s look at it this way: have you ever kissed friends before? Sid maybe?”

Jungkook snorted. “God forbid.”

“Minjun, then?”

“No,” he said. “Do you think I should?”

You snickered. “No. But if we’re friends, too, then we probably shouldn’t do that, either.”

He looked at you, his lips puckered in thought. Unconsciously, you had started to scrape at the dark paint of the bench.

You hadn’t meant a word of what you’d said. He suspected as much.

“Probably not,” he agreed. “But we’re such a mess, though, right?”

The echo of your own words on the plane brought a smile to your face again—a reaction more rooted in easing the sudden surge of anticipation rather than genuine amusement.

“Yeah,” you said quietly. “We’re such a mess.”

Jungkook felt a little afraid, which was something that he always felt when the world around him blurred, and he found himself incapable of looking away from your lips.

It was dangerous, this tunnel vision. This singular focus. This impossible, magnetic pull that defied all reason, that made the whole universe tremble with a silent—

He leaned closer.

For a fleeting moment, the space between you was filled with nothing but your echoing heartbeats and silent memories.

For a fleeting moment, time itself held its breath.

You remembered Oslo and the way Jungkook had pulled away. You remembered how worried you were, how horrified—he was drunk, and he’d pulled away. He’d done the rational thing.

Funny thing, rationality.

You thought you were perfectly rational when you closed the remaining distance and your lips brushed against his—hesitant, uncertain, tender. A permission, a question, and his unequivocal death, all in one.

Jungkook inhaled—as if checking if he was alive or just pretending to be—and reached up to touch your cheek. He pulled you closer and stole the remnants of your breath with his kiss.

It was fair, he thought. You had stolen his entire soul.

The touch of your lips lasted for less than a minute—not nearly enough time for the trees around you to exhale in clandestine relief—but the softness of his mouth, the slow, intoxicating smacking of your lips against his, and the faint notes of mint on his tongue did irreparable damage to your pulse.

He stole that too, he supposed, because when he pulled away, his heart seemed to beat with enough strength to support the lives of half the population.

“Do friends discuss what it means if they kiss?” he asked, winded. His chest touched yours every time it rose in an attempt to recover.

Your laughter was breathless, too. “I’m thinking no.”

“I like what you’re thinking.”

Something very tranquil and very happy was inscribed into the contours of your features.

Soft red feathers spread across the sky above you as the city slowly stirred awake.

For the first time in a long time, everything felt like it was supposed to.

“I have a free day tomorrow,” you said. “Well, today.”

Jungkook was a bit puzzled by the shift in conversation but went along with it nonetheless. “Yeah?”

“Mhmm. The girls and I made plans, but I’m, uh—I’m going to call my mum before I go. I set an alarm for it and everything,” you said with a self-conscious chuckle. “I’m going to talk to her.”

“Oh.” He was shaking a little, he realised. He hoped you wouldn’t notice it and decide to give him his flannel back. “Well, that—that’s good. You should do that.”

You nodded, lowering your gaze to the grass and the pebbles below. “Yeah.”

“I’m going to kiss you again,” he decided. “For good luck.”

Your surprised smile overshadowed everything else he wanted to tell you.

“Oh,” you said. “Is that what friends do?”

“Yes,” he replied. “You didn’t know? It can’t be just one kiss, that’s bad luck.”

“Actually, I heard even numbers are bad luck.”

He gasped theatrically. “Oh, but that’s terrible! I’ll have to kiss you three times, then. To be safe.”

You smiled and shook your head. He died a little then, because everything was here, just like in his worst nightmares and his favourite daydreams: your scent, your eyes, your smile. All of you.

“You’re always such an idiot,” you said with so much affection that the wind crept away miserably, defeated by the warmth in Jungkook’s gaze when he looked at you. When he felt your hand on the side of his face—gentle and careful so as not to touch the healing bruises on his cheek.

“Hmm.” He wasn’t sure if he’d ever remember how to breathe again. “You said you love me, though.”

“I do,” you said, beaming, as you ran the tips of your fingers over the edges of his wolf cut. “It’s a burden I have to live with.”

He shivered from your touch and leaned in—impatient, all of a sudden. His lips met yours with a soft, rehearsed touch, and he thought he died all over again when you pulled him closer.

Your heart brought back the memories of sensations that you’ve tried to bury; it revived them and set them loose in your chest when you kissed him back and felt the smile on his lips.

Your heart threatened to quit it, to burst into flames and take you down with it when you felt his tongue slowly glide over your lower lip.

Your heart settled right against his when you parted your lips. When you felt his warm breath mingle with yours. When you held onto him with everything you were feeling, and he held onto you.

He kissed you in every way that a friend wasn’t supposed to, and groaned softly when he touched the back of your neck and felt the relentless roughness of goosebumps under his fingertips. Your body reflected everything he was feeling.

Every time your lips met—gentle and feverish—every time he pulled you closer—frantic and heated—every time you inhaled when he exhaled—sharp and eager—you were setting fire to something that once was and building something new in its place.

There seemed to be small fragments of a foreign nature inside of you both—fragments that had danced with each other long before your first kiss and would continue the lively, eternal swaying for years and years after your last.

Maybe it was dust from two neighbouring stars, drawn together by a force stronger than them, but forced to crash somewhere on earth and settle and quiver and wake up inside of you both.

Or maybe it was something less grand. Maybe it was just luck. Just coincidence.

“See,” you whispered, pulling back. “I told you we don’t know how to be friends.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” he replied, kissing the corner of your lips. The sparks inside him were fierce and relentless when you smiled in response. “I think friends can decide what sort of friends they want to be.”

“What sort of friends are we going to be, then?”

“This sort.”

You could see the northern lights and the tails of comets in his eyes before he leaned in to kiss you again. You could taste the longing for the Milky Way and the whispers of timeless meteors on his tongue.

And it all solidified this for you: the two of you were not luck and not coincidence.

You were something much more.

chapter title credits: bring me the horizon, “follow you”

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