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taexual · 5 days

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sleepwalking ● 23 | 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 drugs (nothing graphic), descriptive SMUT (pet names and a sprinkle of worship included, beware), fluff and too much flirting to be allowed, some angst, SLOW BURN

words: 19.8k

read from the beginning ○ masterlist

chapter 23 ► in this open warfare, i won't fight fair, and in your waking moments, i will be there

The next morning, you and Jungkook took Minjun, Luna, and Maggie to a small restaurant—unreasonably far from your hotel in London—to have a late breakfast and to plot. The five of you were a lot more concerned with the latter, and the bacon and egg sandwiches on your plates were relegated to mere decoration.

You had already discussed your plan with Luna and Maggie over the phone last night, but you wanted to meet everyone in person to ensure you were all on the same page, and to inform Jungkook of his role (which was intentionally non-existent).

You believed that the fewer members of Rated Riot got tangled up in Sid’s slimy web, the lower the risk of collateral damage. Ideally, you would have left Jungkook out entirely. But his friendship with Sid made him a linchpin in the machinations of your scheme—he would be the most affected if something went awry.

“This plan relies heavily on the circumstances, I admit,” you said, while your friends feigned interest in their food to avoid the disapproving glances of the restaurant staff. “But maybe that will work to our advantage because we will hardly have to do anything. We will draw the authorities’ attention to Sid, and that’s it. He’ll do the rest himself.”

“Yeah,” Minjun added as your primary accomplice in this scheme. He was busy trying to stop his napkins from blowing away in the fierce wind on the restaurant’s terrace. “And that’s why we need Jude to let us into their hotel room—”

“Wait,” had become Jungkook’s new favourite word. He used it now, too. “And are we sure that Jude won’t change his mind?”

Maggie and Luna turned to you, mirroring Jungkook’s skepticism.

“We’re not,” you admitted. You were aware of the risk, but time has never been more of the essence, and Jude was your best option. “We’re not telling him too much and hoping for the best.”

“And to be honest,” Minjun added, “the fact that she gave him that laundry list of shit to do—”

“Wait,” Jungkook said again. “What list?”

You waved off his question, but Minjun answered on your behalf, clinging to this as if it was the only convincing evidence the five of you had against Jude changing his mind.

“Like, vitamins and stuff,” he explained. “To ease his withdrawals. I don’t know if he followed her instructions, but anyone could see how much it meant to him, just the fact that she cared enough. Maybe that’ll be what keeps him on our side, even though he’s back with Sid right now.”

Maggie wrinkled her nose in clear disapproval, although you knew she would have reacted the same way if she’d seen Jude—her heart was bigger than her head, bless her.

“He’s done nothing to deserve this from you,” she pointed out.

“Yeah, he—yeah,” Jungkook agreed, the confidence in his voice wavering as he alternated between gratitude for your concern about Jude, and guilt for putting you in this position. “You didn’t have to help him.”

“He’s really not doing well,” you said. “And don’t think I’m so kind, I acted largely out of my own self-interest. We need him for our plan.”

Jungkook recalled Jude’s sneezing, his shivers in forty-degree heat, and his nausea. All of his symptoms always came and went without warning, but the memory of someone going out of their way for him was likely to stay.

“Okay,” Jungkook acquiesced. “That’s—let’s keep going.”

“We won’t need to involve Jude every step of the way, though, right?” Luna clarified. “I mean, I assumed we’d mainly need him to get rid of whatever Sid has in his phone gallery.”

“Yeah, but not just—we’re not just deleting the videos with Jungkook,” you said, glancing at Minjun, who had supported you wholeheartedly when you mentioned this part of the plan to him. He nodded now, too, encouraging you to explain. “We’ll delete everything he has in his Cloud storage and factory reset his phone. I doubt Sid had enough sense to back up his files to an external drive, so this will clear every copy of everything he has on there.”

Maggie’s eyes finally lit up with lively excitement, Luna nodded in agreement, and you felt a smile forming on your own lips, too.

Jungkook, on the other hand, appeared almost disappointed.

“W-we don’t have to go through all of this just to delete those videos,” he said, fixing his gaze on his untouched cup of matcha latte; the artwork on the surface had begun to blur. “Those things happened. I did all of that shit, and Sid recorded it. That’s who I was back then, and maybe I shouldn’t try to—”

You interrupted his words—the ones you’d already heard before—with a gentle touch of your hand over his restless fingers, and Jungkook stilled, turning to you.

“No, those videos are not who you are. You are the one who decides who you are,” you reiterated once more and the table fell silent around you as if everyone had witnessed something they were not supposed to. “And if you want to leave those things in the past, you should be able to. Sid has no right to bring it up now.”

“But if we lock Sid up,” he persisted, “then maybe those videos won’t matter anyway.”

“He could publish them,” Minjun countered. “He sent them directly to you now, but he could post them publicly later. I’m sure he’d find a way to do that even behind bars.”

Jungkook felt a rush of dizziness and he was very grateful that you’d pressed your hand on his. Minjun was right. Sid had done something like this before when he’d posted your picture; he clearly wasn’t above making private matters public.

“We would leave the videos be, let Sid have them, whatever,” you continued, reading the colour on his face, “but he wants to use them against you. He’s cutting them up to paint you as an irresponsible asshole. And you’re not an asshole, Jungkook.”

“Yeah,” Minjun agreed. “And I talked to Jude about an hour ago. He sounded sober, which is shocking to me, but, anyway—Sid has plans to go out tonight, so Jude should be able to do this tomorrow morning while Sid’s still passed out.”

The whole terrace of the restaurant seemed to hold its breath in anticipation as soon as he said that, the clink of cutlery and the muffled chatter around you growing tense.

Jungkook, even dizzier now, turned back to you once more. You gave him a small nod.

He took a breath and nodded back. “Okay. Alright. Fine. Let’s do it.”

“Good!” Maggie cheered from across the table. She turned to Jungkook, and you watched as her reassuring tone chased the last doubts from his eyes. “Even without those videos, we need to do this to get back at Sid. And I know this will do just that. I’d be tearing my hair out if someone cleansed my Cloud.”

You noticed that Maggie was much more vigilant with her phone today, hardly letting it out of her sight. She’d improved her security measures and had to enter her passcode every time she wanted to reply to a text today, because the facial recognition struggled to recognise the wind in her hair. This was the reason she hadn’t bothered with it before, but Sid had taught her a valuable lesson.

You gave your friend an agreeing nod and settled against the back of your chair.

Luna sat on your other side, leaning her elbows on the table, and she quickly noted the way Jungkook’s eyes widened when you pulled back, as if you had torn off a piece of his skin. She glanced at Maggie, who noticed nothing and kept checking the time on her phone as if she was late for another meeting to plan someone’s arrest.

Somewhat disappointed, Luna turned back to you, her grin doubling in size to compensate for her lack of company in teasing you.

“One big problem,” you said, focused on the intricacies of your plan and, therefore, unaware of your surroundings, “lies in our next steps. If we manage to get Sid arrested, he will likely weaponise his friendship with Jungkook. He’ll try to make it seem like they’re as close as brothers, and if he’s going to jail for meth possession, then Jungkook is probably doing drugs, too.”

You pulled your phone out from your bag and allowed for the weight of your words to settle on the table like a heavy grey tablecloth while you opened your gallery.

“So, this morning,” you continued, “Maggie and I put something together. This is a list of people who are banned from Rated Riot’s shows.”

You passed your phone to Luna first. She looked at the screen, nodded, and handed the phone to Maggie, who smiled to herself right away—she had designed the layout of the list and was very pleased with it.

By the time your phone reached Jungkook, he was already squirming in his chair. As he examined the list of names, displayed in bold white letters on a black background with a crumpled paper texture that Maggie had crafted and digitalised herself, he realised that the only name he recognised was Sid’s.

He looked up. “But if you post that—that’s—isn’t it supposed to be confidential?”

“I won’t post it,” you said. “We’ll leak it.”

“Oh.” A gleam of affection suddenly sparkled in his eyes. He felt a little like he’d just met you for the first time, all over again. “Can we do that?

Maggie reached across the table, snatching your phone from Jungkook’s hand to see the picture of the list again. She scrutinised the names for a minute as if trying to uncover the social security numbers of the people listed.

“No,” you replied. “But Sid never played fair, so we’re simply levelling the playing field. The other names on the list are made up anyway. They’re generic enough to match someone on Facebook, but no one will know which person is on this list.”

“But they’ll recognise Sid,” Maggie pointed out, squinting at your phone. “Even though he’s listed as Isidore here. Right?”

“That’s him, yeah,” you confirmed. “And you’re right. Everyone will recognise Sid. We’ll leak this before he gets arrested, and anything he says after that will just be taken as blatant slander.”

Jungkook took another deep breath and glanced at your phone, which Maggie slid towards you across the table. It bumped against the corner of your empty water glass.

“Won’t there be consequences if something else leaks?” he asked, his teeth grazing his bottom lip.

“Yeah, I was thinking that, too,” you admitted. “But then, Luna texted me a brilliant idea last night.”

You gestured towards your friend, and she continued.

“It’ll be accidental,” she explained. “Maggie usually posts backstage pictures on her Instagram. She has almost as many followers as the main account of your band at this point. So, later today, she will post a new set of pictures, and this list of names will just happen to be visible in some shots. Just a coincidence, really. And then we hope that one of your fans will notice it, zoom in, catch Sid’s name, and share it.”

Jungkook looked down, nodding to himself. He realised that Sid stood little chance against the collective resolve of everyone at this table.

“They will notice it,” he said. “I don’t doubt it.”

“We’ll have to rely on them to spread this,” you added. “Even though this list isn’t really something we need to hide. It’s just, you know, sort of customary in the industry to keep your dirty laundry to yourself.”

“Alright,” Jungkook said, sensing the weight of everyone’s gaze on him. He had the feeling that everyone was waiting for his final approval to move forward with this plan. “So, uh, Maggie won’t get into trouble for posting it?”

“Hmm?” Maggie looked up from her phone at the sound of her name. “Oh. No. I’m the photographer. As long as I get good shots, I never get in trouble. And this wouldn’t be the first time I’ve taken a picture that reveals more than I intended.”

She gave you a sheepish look, and you shook your head, sensing where the guilt in her eyes stemmed from. Maggie knew that Sid was behind the chaos caused by the bathtub picture, but she still felt a gnawing sense of responsibility because she was the one who had taken the picture.

“Alright. You, uh—you guys really put a lot of thought into this,” Jungkook remarked, looking at you first, then at your friends, and finally at Minjun on his other side. “I’m, uh—I-I’m actually a little afraid of you.”

Luna and Minjun snickered—Maggie was back on her phone, but she was smiling, too—and their excitement made you feel much more optimistic.

“Good,” you said, reaching out to touch Jungkook’s hand again. He immediately turned his hand round and firmly clasped yours—to ensure you wouldn’t pull away this time. “Sid should be, too.”

A tense silence settled over the table, punctuated by the subdued conversations on the terrace.

For the first time since you arrived at the restaurant, Jungkook finally took a sip of his coffee. It tasted bitter and lukewarm. You refrained from touching yours, but accepted a bite of Luna’s tiramisu. Everyone else at the table seemed to remember simultaneously that they had ordered food when they got here.

“Uh,” Maggie spoke up after a second, still chewing on the brown crust of her bacon and egg tart. “Is this a safe space for us to voice our, uh, concerns?”

You straightened in your seat, bracing yourself before she’s even said anything. Jungkook sensed your growing anxiety and squeezed your hand.

“Of course,” you replied, keeping your voice steady.

“Okay.” Maggie swallowed and set down her fork after taking exactly one and a half bites. “Well, I’m worried that Sid will say something provocative and one of us will end up getting arrested for assault.”

There was something absurdly comical in her question—or the potential outcome it suggested—and you could see Minjun quickly lower his head to conceal his broad smile.

Jungkook, meanwhile, was extremely pleased that no one turned to look at him, the person who had, more or less, already assaulted Sid before. It comforted him to know that everyone here would have loved to smack Sid upright in the head, too.

“That’s a great point,” you said, clearing your throat. “If he provokes you—well, then you might have a legitimate reason to, uh, land a good punch. You probably wouldn’t be held in custody too long for that. There’s no premeditation, you acted on impulse because of something he said.”

Minjun raised an eyebrow at you from across the table.

“I thought our focus was drug laws,” he said. “Did you research assault, too?”

“I researched assault laws the day I met Sid,” you deadpanned.

He snorted. “Yeah, fair enough.”

“Not to mention, we can always argue it’s self-defence,” Luna added, prodding her sandwich with a toothpick as if it were a not-quite-dead bug. “Sid is very—let’s say, aggressive.”

“That’s true,” Minjun agreed. “Especially when he’s irritated.”

The energy around the table had increased considerably; everyone seemed to have something to say about possible reasons to hit Sid. Maggie was already listing five ways to throw a punch that would knock out your opponent—she had a WikiHow article open and was illustrating it with enthusiastic demonstrations on Minjun.

You realised, quite suddenly, how happy you were to sit here with your friends. They were smart and cunning enough to rob a bank, escape a prison, and start a money laundering scheme all in a week, but they chose to be sweet and loving and a little vengeful instead. You felt almost giddy.

“He wouldn’t throw the first punch, though,” Jungkook interjected with a hint of frustrated sorrow. Maggie halted her research, retracting her fist from Minjun’s cheek. “He’ll just keep running his mouth until you strike him. And he’ll make sure the provocation is very minimal.”

“Well, sure, but who at this table will attest to any of that?” Luna questioned, undeterred. “Everyone who witnessed Sid throwing the first punch, raise your hands.”

All of you raised your hands in perfect synchronisation, and Jungkook felt himself smile again.

He had never doubted the success of your plan, even if he doubted the details. But sitting here now, while all of you held your hands up, he was fully convinced that this meeting marked the beginning of the end for Sid.

“Right. Okay,” he said. “I like how this is looking.”

“Me too,” Maggie said, locking her phone and slouching in her chair. “I feel better now. Didn’t want to spend the night at the police station.”

“You wouldn’t,” Luna assured her. “We’d bail you out.”

She snickered. “That’s good to—”

Jungkook suddenly jumped up in his chair, interrupting her.

“What about Sid’s bail?” he asked urgently. “Can he—could he pay for his release?”

Everyone at the table turned to you once more. When you and Minjun did your research yesterday, your focus had quickly turned from penalties to potential loopholes that Sid might use with his money, so you understood their sudden concern.

“No,” you said. “Apparently, it doesn’t work like that here. They would give him bail automatically; he wouldn’t have to pay. But they need to charge him with a specific offence first, and they won’t know the exact charges until they know what, uh, substances he was carrying on him and keeping in his hotel room—oh, and how much. Not to mention, bail may be denied if there is a risk that he’ll commit further crimes. And we know Sid is violent. He will not sit idly in his little cell.”

“Yeah,” Minjun agreed. “We’re 95% sure he won’t be given bail.”

You nodded, grateful for his confidence.

“So, we definitely won’t be in London by the time they charge him,” Maggie concluded, frowning. She regretted not ordering whiskey instead of espresso; alcohol helped her think.

“Definitely not,” you confirmed. “Our plan concludes with Sid’s arrest, everything else is not our problem anymore. And we’re only participating in this as the staff of Rated Riot, so the only people who will have to speak to the police are those who will be present when they arrive at the venue tomorrow. So, ideally, only Luna, Mick, and me. That’s it. That’s as far as we’re getting involved.”

“Wait,” Jungkook said. He understood the need for Mick’s presence and felt comforted that you’d have someone from security with you, but now he was worried about your friend. “Why Luna?”

“We need an additional witness to observe Sid’s erratic behaviour,” Luna explained. “We thought it’d be better to have someone random, and not just your manager and head of security there.”

Jungkook kept his gaze on hers. “How do you know he’ll behave erratically?”

She gave him a look.

“Right.” He leaned back in his seat. “Good point. Okay.”

He already knew that the odds were good that Sid would try to provoke you tomorrow, but now he realised that even if Sid suddenly decided to be docile, it wouldn’t matter. The five of you were tight as a glove—Sid could sit in a corner, purring and meowing, and you would all collectively claim that he was threatening you.

Finally, Jungkook realised that he had narrowly escaped something dreadful, and he felt very grateful to find himself at this table, and not on the other side of this plan.

“I, uh—this isn’t a concern exactly,” you said after a minute. “But I have to say that a lot of this hinges on Sid trusting my word, and I’m—well, I’m not sure if he’ll care about anything I tell him.”

Minjun looked almost offended. He was the one who devised this strategy after you told him that you needed a way to quickly draw the attention of the authorities to Sid.

Why don’t you call him? Minjun had suggested. And invite him to meet you.

You had thought he’d decided to go insane right before talking to you. But you’d kept your suspicions to yourself because, ultimately, calling Sid seemed like the only option. It felt unfair, however, not to mention your doubts now.

“Actually, I agree,” Jungkook said, giving you a long look. “I’m not sure if I’m comfortable with any of that. You’ll have to be alone in a room with Sid. And we can’t be sure that he won’t—”

“Sid will care,” Minjun asserted, ignoring everything Jungkook had said. He kept his gaze on you, his certainty almost as intimidating as it was comforting. “Maybe not because he has feelings for you, but because you’re Jungkook’s girlfriend.”

Maggie looked up from her phone, surprised about the possibility of Sid having any feelings at all, and turned to Luna. The two of them finally exchanged the look that Luna had been waiting for.

“And you’re okay with doing this?” Jungkook asked you, his gaze flickering from your eyes to your lips. He was careful not to miss any hint of dishonesty.

“I’m okay if this actually works,” you said. “If Sid shows up. If we get him arrested. I’m willing to try this if you’re all sure that we’ll succeed. And I wouldn’t be all by myself anyway.”

“Yeah, don’t worry about that part,” Maggie said to Jungkook, rolling up her sleeves for emphasis. Technically, she wasn’t supposed to be at the scene tomorrow, but she felt she had a personal debt to settle with Sid, so she would find a way to interfere if she had to. “I can fight.”

Jungkook looked at her in a way that was more amused than it was skeptical—Maggie was very small in size, but very big in energy—and she tried to flex her arms to prove her point.

“I believe you,” he said, a smile breaking through his uncertainty. “I just don’t like that this will all be happening during our show. I won’t be there with you.”

“That’s just the plan,” you said. “We need to keep you away from him so that anything he says later won’t carry any weight. He’s obsessed with you and he has problems, and you’ve been distancing yourself from him for some time now. We’ll release an official statement about your, uh, separation once we’re done with him. And the leaked blacklist will back up our claims.”

A resigned acceptance clouded Jungkook’s features: he understood that this was the right decision, but he couldn’t help feeling unhappy about it. However, although he would have typically complained and whined about this—and you expected him to—now his posture was stoic.

You felt a little dispirited. You knew you wouldn’t joke around much today, but Jungkook’s unusually serious demeanour emphasised the gravity of the situation even more.

“Okay,” Minjun said. “Any other concerns?”

You shifted your gaze to him.

“Actually, I have another one,” you said. “I’m also worried about how this will affect your parents.”

The two girls beside you exchanged another glance—you hadn’t explained Minjun’s family’s dependence on Sid’s mother yet.

“If Sid’s in prison?” Minjun asked, unperturbed. “Well, their stocks will probably drop, so it will be weird to throw a party. I think we’ll celebrate quietly.”

You glanced at Jungkook, and he met your eye with an amused grin.

“You sure you’re okay with this?” he asked Minjun then.

“Are you kidding?” Minjun looked optimistic and upbeat. He seemed ready to take on the world, and locking up Sid was just the first step. “We should have done this years ago.”

Maggie suddenly slammed her palm on the table, forcing everyone’s coffee cups to rattle against the plates.

“That’s what I’m talking about!” she exclaimed, and her excitement quickly spread to the rest of the table.

“I agree,” Luna added, much quieter. “But maybe it’s time we headed out. The people at the next table are whispering and, uh, pointing at Jungkook.”

Jungkook raised his eyebrows and turned to you instead of looking around, his expression filled with a shocked wonder. He had only been recognised in public a handful of times since Rated Riot started out, and each instance had left an indelible mark on him.

You gave him a smile and a nod that spurred him out of his chair and towards the people at the neighbouring table, all of whom held their breaths when he stood up.

You glanced back at your friends—all smiling as they watched Jungkook introduce himself and singlehandedly cut off the air supply of four different people—and you thought about how wonderful it would have been if you had met Maggie and Luna earlier. If Jungkook and Minjun had stopped entertaining Sid’s whims sooner. If you and Jungkook had never broken up at all.

Perhaps, you thought, there was an alternative universe where you’d known and loved these people your whole life. You felt very close to that universe now.

Just as you finished your breakfast—where the five of you consumed one cup of coffee and half a slice of tiramisu in total—you executed the first step of your plan and sent a text message to Sid. It was innocuous, just a conversational, “are you ever going to stop doing this?” but it was meant to serve as a subtle precursor—so as not to approach him out of the blue tomorrow.

Then, as the five of you exited the restaurant, Maggie got enthralled by the most gracious little corgi sitting at a table, and dragged Luna and Minjun (who looked like he was not sure what was happening) back inside to ask for pictures. You and Jungkook opted for a scenic route back to the hotel instead.

Although the day was overcast, the sky did not look particularly ominous, offering instead an unexpected serenity that you thought you could use to clear your thoughts.

Interestingly, fresh air was not what you really needed at all. It was his hand holding yours as you strolled past extravagant hotels and expensive restaurants near Hyde Park, weaving through crowds of rushing tourists and cranky locals.

You felt significantly lighter with your hand in his, but Jungkook still appeared troubled. The shadows on his face were far more pronounced than those in the sky.

“What’s on your mind?” you asked.

He let out a weary sigh as he met your gaze. He seemed overwhelmed—as though his head was trying very hard to grow twice as large to contain all his thoughts, while the rest of his body fought desperately to resist the growth.

“I—well, I didn’t want to say this in front of everyone,” he started slowly, “but I’m worried about you.”

“Me?” You frowned. “Wh—because of Sid?”

“Because you’re doing all of this on top of your other responsibilities,” he said. “I don’t want you to burn out.”

Your expression visibly softened, but dark edges of guilt still coated the appreciation in your eyes. You felt disappointed in yourself—for letting it get so far that, over a week later, Jungkook still sometimes looked at you as though you might faint any second.

“That won’t happen,” you replied, your tone gentle, but determined. “I promise. And I’m not alone. I have so much help. And this won’t—it’s just a few days. We deal with it tomorrow, and it’s over.”

“Okay. But what if it’s not?” he questioned then. “We’re heading to Paris right after we, potentially, deal with Sid. And what if it doesn’t work, and we’re not here to fix it?”

You had to admit, this same possibility had been weighing on your mind ever since Jude first mentioned the bags of drugs in Sid’s hotel room. However, as soon as you saw Jungkook’s solemn features, you found yourself resisting all these worries. You would figure it out, no matter what happened, just so he wouldn’t have to worry about it anymore.

You shrugged nonchalantly. “Then it won’t work.”

“He’ll be furious,” Jungkook said. “Even more vindictive than before.”

“I know,” you replied. “But no matter what he decides to do, we won’t back down, either.”

Jungkook frowned so deeply that several new wrinkles declared permanent residence between his brows. He dreaded the idea of spending a lifetime seeking revenge.

You sensed the reason for his apprehension—you wanted this over quickly, too—and instinctively squeezed his hand.

“I’m with you,” you said, reaching for your phone to check if Sid had reacted to your text. “And I told you, I’m not entirely convinced that this will work, either. I mean, here, look. Sid hasn’t replied. But if this plan falls through, we’ll come up with something else. Maybe something—well, less grand.”

He glanced at your phone, toying with his lip ring between his teeth. The prospect of failure felt more daunting with each second that Sid remained free to do whatever he pleased.

Jungkook didn’t want to do something else. He wanted this to work.

“Maybe he hasn’t replied because Jude deleted everything,” he suggested, searching for a plausible explanation that aligned with your plan. “Including the texts.”

“No, that’s tomorrow,” you reminded him. He groaned. “We need—Sid needs to notice my texts first. Then we delete them. I’ll use a disposable SIM card tomorrow, so there’s no trace that I ever contacted him.”

Jungkook felt like his head had already grown far too large for his body. He was a bit unsteady on his feet and clutched your hand tighter.

“Right,” he said. “Okay. That—yeah, no.” He lifted your intertwined hands to scratch something at his forehead. “My head is spinning. I can’t remember that much.”

You gave him a sympathetic nod. “That’s fine.”

“I’m not saying that I’d be too dumb to follow a plan like this,” he felt the need to insist.

“I didn’t think that.”

“I’m just saying,” he continued. “There’s a lot.”

You nodded in exaggerated agreement again. “Mhmm.”

His eagerness to prove his intelligence to you was very endearing. But it was a little funny, too, and Jungkook stopped walking to study your expression more closely. After a moment, he came to an appalling conclusion.

“You think I’m dumb,” he said.

A wide smile finally broke out on your face. “I think you’re very pretty.”

“Very pr—okay.” His expression shifted as you laughed, pulling on his hand to continue walking after an elderly couple gave you a rather well-deserved disapproving look for blocking their path. “Pretty and dumb. Is that your type?”

“It is,” you said, grinning. “That’s why you’re the only boyfriend I’ve had.”

He raised his eyebrows and scoffed. “Oh—wow. Wow. I am both very flattered and very offended.”

You chuckled, gently pushing his shoulder with yours. Jungkook shook his head and finally smiled, too. But right as he prepared to say something else, he ended up having to quickly yank your hand, pulling you into him and out of the way of an oncoming bicycle.

“Shit,” you were breathless against his chest as the bike drove past, your hair whipping forcefully in the wind, “thank you.”

“Pretty and dumb,” he said, allowing you to take a step away from him now that the danger has passed, “but with great reflexes, huh?”

You laughed again, leaning into him when you did and successfully dissolving everything sharp and uncomfortable in his chest.

“I know you’re not dumb,” you said. “And let’s be realistic: Minjun and I had been simmering in the details of this plan for days. You just barely learned about it a few hours ago. We’ve got this. I wanted you to know what we’ll do, but I don’t want you to be involved at all.”

“Yeah. I—no, I just…” he faltered, weighing his next words. The thought of everything that would happen tomorrow made his stomach feel very heavy. “I feel like you’re trying to protect me from Sid by keeping me out of this, and I’m—I don’t know how that makes me feel.”

“We’re not just keeping you out, we’re keeping the whole band out,” you said. “I want to protect all four of you. And if anything, you’re the only member who isn’t entirely excluded. Does that… make it any better?”

Jungkook considered this for a moment.

“Not sure,” he said. “Because I’m still not participating.”

Exhaling softly, you looked around, searching for a quiet spot on the pavement where the two of you could step away from the crowd. Nearby, there were two traditional phone booths that tourists were gathered around, obstructing your view. Once you passed them, you noticed a parking meter right by the park gate that everyone seemed to avoid. You decided to pause there.

Jungkook glanced around before stopping in front of you, slightly unsettled by the large, dark green hedge covering the park fence, and all the bugs that emerged from it—bees, mostly. They all seemed very curious about him.

“Okay, look at it this way,” you began. “Sid has known you and Minjun since you were kids. He knows all your weak points. He can predict exactly how you and Minjun will react in any situation. Sure, you took him off guard when you gave up your Katana, but he can still read you very well. He doesn’t have that luxury with me, Luna, or Maggie. He’s less certain about our reactions. Who else could do this if not us?”

“Right,” Jungkook murmured. “But you’re still going out of your way for me, and I feel—”

“And why wouldn’t I?” you interrupted. “I love you.”

He thought he died for just a second and it felt surprisingly nice: he could feel something soft and warm against his skin—the phantom shivers of every time you’ve touched him before—and he could taste a sweet, lingering flavour on his tongue—from every time he felt your mouth against his own.

He would never tire of hearing you say you loved him. The only downside was that his chest usually attempted to collapse in on itself right after that, leaving him speechless for anywhere from a minute to several days.

“Not to mention,” you continued while Jungkook fought against the haze in his mind and the bumblebees around his neck. “Sid has long stopped at just you. With the videos and pictures he’s sending you, he’s threatening everyone on this tour. Anything that affects your reputation, affects the band and the staff, too. So, when you look at it like that, we’re really doing this for everyone.”

Finally, Jungkook managed to stop his thoughts from pulling him in every direction and anchored himself to this pavement right here—with you, and the persistent bugs, and the chattering of people as they walked past you.

He squeezed your hand that he had not let go—not now, and probably not ever, really—and exhaled.

“Yeah, I get that,” he said. “But I was the one who brought him here, and that’s—I guess that’s what’s bothering me right now.”

“You did bring him here,” you agreed.

“I—oh.” He looked up, his eyebrows knitting together. He had expected something else. An ‘I told you that was a shit decision’ or a sarcastic ‘yeah, and thanks for that’—but your kind expression did not change. “Y-yeah. I did.”

“But we’ll get him out,” you said.

Jungkook held your hand and observed you, trying to process this while simultaneously trying to figure out what was it about him that attracted these British bees to him so much. It couldn’t be his cologne, because you loved him far more than he’d allowed himself to believe. It couldn’t be his clothes, either, because you were looking at him like you believed anything was possible in this world, and he thought it really was.

He realised that to you, he must have appeared as if he were struggling to interpret prehistoric cave wall paintings, and this process was causing him immense pain. He cleared his throat.

“You don’t blame me?” he asked.

“For making a stupid decision?” you replied, and shrugged your shoulders after he nodded. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

He pressed his lips together, his expression a mixture of incredulity and pure delight.

“Okay,” he said. “Sure.”

You were smiling again, and he was a little too proud to admit how much your loving eyes and your great mood soothed his anxiety.

“And what would I gain from punishing you?” you added. “You’ve already seen through Sid. You’ve had enough. You learned your lesson. You’re good.”

Jungkook felt his chest swell as though he’d swallowed the swarms of bees around him, and now they’ve built a cosy little home right on the hills of his heart.

“You think so?” he asked, his eyes glistening.

“Why do you look so excited?” you countered. “Do you have more dickhead friends I haven’t met yet?”

He chuckled, waving his hand around his face. “Can I answer that inside the park? I’m afraid these bees are in love with me.”

You had already noticed his struggle with the bees—it was hard not to, one was perched right on his shoulder—and you found your own apparent immunity to this new bee predicament especially entertaining.

“Want me to fight them for you?” you suggested.

“Oh, in a battle of who loves me more?” he quipped, swatting vigorously at three stubborn bees that were particularly intrigued in his eyes.

“Yeah,” you said. “We’ll all sting you at the same time, and whoever dies first, wins.”

He snorted. “These are bumblebees. They don’t die after they sting.”

“Oh, so maybe we should just stay here,” you teased. “You all seem to know quite a bit about each other already.”

He squinted at you, a smirk playing on his lips. “Are you jealous I’ve grown so close to these bees?”

“Of course. They’re all over you.”

“I’d rather have you all over—”

“Public park!” you interjected hastily, cutting him off.

His laughter in response was unapologetic and infectious—you found yourself shaking your head to suppress a treacherous smile.

“Did you also research public indecency laws?” he asked, turning past the menacing, bee-infested hedge.

You followed him through the gates into the park, your fingers intertwined with his. The clouds above had thickened, and the wind had picked up, but there was nothing about this afternoon that Jungkook did not enjoy.

“Actually, I did,” you replied. “Because of that stunt you pulled in New York last year.”

Recognition flashed in his eyes for just a fleeting moment before he pursed his lips, distancing himself from the memory. A gentle breeze swept through the park, rustling leaves and carrying the scent of damp earth; it would rain soon.

“I don’t remember,” he declared.

“Really?” you responded wryly. You both knew very well that he remembered. “Nothing familiar to you about the busking that turned into half-naked dancing in the middle of the street?”

“Nope,” he said. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

“There was a lot more grinding than actual dancing, now that I think about it,” you pressed on. You noticed, through your peripherals, the way he scrunched his nose and furrowed his brows, evidently despising the memory he claimed he did not have. “Someone had drawn a crown of thorns on your forehead. You had a—sort of a cloth wrapped around your waist, and nothing else. Almost everyone on the face of the earth accused you of being in a sex cult after those pictures came out.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” he insisted. “They must have confused me with someone else.”

“Sure. They must have,” you relented, pouting your lips in mock-sympathy. “There are plenty of people in sex cults out there.”

“Exactly,” he replied, finally meeting your eyes.

Something about you bringing up this incident—“incidents” were a prominent category of his actions in his mind—reminded him of the videos Sid had sent him. However, with you, the feelings in his chest were vastly different.

You were playful. Lighthearted. Your love language was teasing the hell out of him.

Sid was venomous. Arrogant. Vile. His intentions were humiliation and destruction.

You were joking about a matter for which Jungkook undoubtedly owed you another apology. He could tell that you knew he would apologise eventually, but you were hoping—with every jest, every tender smile, every affectionate bite you sent his way—that he would not plunge himself into self-loathing again.

He wouldn’t. He had matured significantly since the day under discussion. He knew he had, even if it was easy to forget.

“I’m surprised how well you remember all that, actually,” he commented. “Are you secretly into sexual rituals?”

Your scoff returned his smile to his face.

“Oh, absolutely,” you said. “I keep a picture of you from that day on my desk at home. I look at it every night before I fall asleep.”

Jungkook kicked a few dry, scattered leaves on the pavement. When he glanced back at you, his grin bordered on ridiculous.

“I am aware that you’re trying to mock me right now,” he said, “but I feel obligated to inform you that I’m taking absolutely everything you say as a compliment.”

You nodded sagely. “I would expect nothing less from you.”

“Good,” he replied. “Please tell me more about how you look at pictures of me before you fall asleep every night.”

You tsked reproachfully at his grin.

“I take back what I said about you being smart,” you said. “You are the biggest idiot I’ve met.”

“Oh,” his face was jubilant, “but that just means you love me that much more, right?”

You let out a deep sigh. “I’m afraid so.”

He felt the swarms of bees in his chest, and they were buzzing incessantly—eager, restless, and yearning. They took every emotion he felt and spread them across his skin.

“I knew it,” he said, delighted by the look on your face. You were so captivating when you were trying to resist smiling; it was why he never stopped teasing you. “This must be awful for you.”

“Mmhm. It is,” you said. “You’re like a disease.”

He nodded, attempting a formal tone. “How bad is it?”

“Chronic and untreatable, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, I am so sorry to hear that.”

“Yeah, thank you.”

A deep, vibrant laughter finally erupted from his chest, and he stopped walking. Tugging on your linked hands, he drew you closer and wrapped his arms around your waist before you could say another word.

“I love you so much, you know that?” he whispered, his voice low against your neck. “It’s not even funny how much.”

He rocked gently on his feet with you in his arms, and you could not tell if the vibrations you felt came from his chest or yours.

“More than the bees love you?” you asked, your hands sliding over his shoulders.

“Much more than the bees love me.”

“Oh, must be quite a lot, then.”

“It is,” he said, chuckling hopelessly. “It really fucking is.”

He tightened his already firm grip until he felt your deep exhale against the side of his neck. He held you and his heartbeat chased after yours while the bustling crowds, the rustling leaves, and the solemn park benches whispered incomprehensibly around you, their frustration about your public affection lost on you.

When he pulled away a minute—or ten—later, he realised that his cologne had brushed off on you. There was something wildly intoxicating about you smelling exactly like him, and he needed a minute to make the park stop spinning.

“I, um—” he started to say, but his voice broke. He cleared his throat, took your hand in his to continue down the park, and tried again. “Jokes aside, I feel—I really appreciate what you do for me. What you’re doing to fix my shit right now, and what you—what you’ve always done to fix my shit. I don’t say that enough. Thank you. For taking care of Sid, too.”

You shook your head. You knew you couldn’t tackle Sid alone—probably no one could.

“This is a team effort,” you replied. “If this works, you can bake us all a cake later.”

Jungkook no longer had even half of a doubt that this would work, one way or the other. And if he’d stayed with you longer, he would have easily started to believe that Rated Riot would be elected presidents, too—one after the other.

“I’m not much of a baker,” he said.

“I’ll help,” you offered.

“Your help,” he responded, his smile turning mischievous, “usually consists of walking around, eating chocolate sprinkles, and distracting me.”

It was your turn to look offended.

“I’m the only one who remembers how many eggs the recipe needs,” you retorted, dignified. “How do I distract you?”

“How can I remember the eggs when you’re dancing and singing around me?” he countered.

He noticed the way your chin quivered as you fought to maintain a serious expression.

“Well, that’s on you,” you said. “Any skilled chef knows to keep their staff busy so they wouldn’t have time to sing and dance. Also, don’t play good songs when we’re in the kitchen.”

“Alright, we’ll bake in silence,” he decided. “And you’ll do everything while I sit and order you around.”

The corners of your lips finally curled into a smirk.

“That’s interesting,” you said, your thumb lightly brushing over his as he swayed your hands. “Switching up the dynamics.”

He glanced at you out of the corner of his eye, very intrigued by the insinuation in your words. “You want me to order you around?”

“I mean…” You shrugged. “I’d like to see you try.”

He stopped walking suddenly, right in the midst of a group of senior ladies, forcing a few of them to gasp and walk around him with very exaggerated expressions of disbelief as though they’d never felt more wronged (there were a few obligatory comments about “kids these days,” too, of course).

Jungkook, undeterred, took a step to the right until he was standing in front of you.

“Kiss me,” he said.

The demand in his tone caught you off guard, but you tried to blink away your surprise. “I didn’t mean right now—”

“Kiss me,” he repeated more assertively.

You felt your stomach lighten and go for a little float inside you, like a loose helium-filled balloon.

“We are in the middle of a busy park,” you said, looking around. “We’re blocking—”

“Kiss me,” he interrupted again, his voice firm but lively, “or I won’t move.”

You poked the inside of your cheek with your tongue, torn between amusement and apprehension as you battled his self-assured grin, while passersby shot disapproving glances at the two of you.

“See, there’s ordering people around,” you said, “and there’s acting like a three-year-old.”

He simply shrugged, relentless. “I see no difference.”

“Do I sound like a toddler when I tell you to do things?”

“Sometimes.”

His satisfied grin only gained prominence when you scoffed and looked away, rolling your eyes.

You questioned, sometimes, how you managed to put up with him for so long. But then you also questioned, much more often, how you’d survived without him at all.

“If I were a teacher,” you said, “you’d be in detention for disrupting everyone’s day.”

“Oh! And what would I have to do?” he teased, mischief gleaming proudly in his eyes. “Write an essay on the importance of respecting authority?”

“That might do you good, actually,” you retorted. “Maybe you should consider writing it anyway.”

He shrugged his shoulders and cocked his head to the side. “Kiss me and I’ll do it.”

He looked so utterly unfazed that you did feel very compelled to lay your hands on him and do something.

He might have been one of the most exasperating people you’ve met in your life, always ready to say something cheeky no matter what you told him, always causing trouble wherever he went, never letting you breathe in peace for just one second.

You were outrageously grateful to have found him.

“People are staring at us,” you said, but there was no conviction in your voice. “We look like idiots.”

Jungkook admired your cautiousness, but he wanted you to let go of it. People would always stare; he just wanted you to kiss him.

“They’re staring because you’re defying authority,” he countered easily.

“Jungkook, just—”

“Oh, see?” he cut in, his tone triumphant. “Maybe you should be the one to write that essay.”

You groaned very demonstratively, but he saw the corners of your lips lift. Finally, you took a small step towards him and pressed your lips to his in a quick peck. He pulled you into him just as you attempted to pull away, and kissed you properly.

At last, the crowds disappeared, allowing you to dissolve in the warmth of his lips and come back to life with all the shivers that ran down your spine when he touched the back of your neck. You felt his smile and felt your own, too, when he brought his tongue over yours, deepening the kiss.

“You are insufferable,” you managed to mumble between kisses, and the affection in your voice was impossible to mistake for something else.

“I love you,” he whispered in response, each word sweet and sugary against your lips.

You kissed him once more—to soothe your racing heart—and then once more again—to soothe his—before you pulled away, whispering back, “I love you.”

Jungkook only managed half of a pleased “I—” before he felt a few soft, cold droplets land on his forehead and both of his cheeks. He raised his head.

“Is it me, or is it—”

“Yeah,” you confirmed, looking up at the angry clouds. “It’s raining.”

“Do you—should we go inside?” he asked, looking around.

There was no specific “inside” anywhere close to the two of you, but you looked at him again and spotted something at the very edge of the park behind him, right across a busy bike lane.

“There’s a little gazebo over there,” you suggested, pointing.

Jungkook turned around and seemed to have an epiphany when he noticed the crooked structure.

“In the—in the park,” he mumbled to himself, feeling a little weak in the knees. He took your hand in his again. “Let’s go.”

He led you straight into the bicycle traffic as he crossed the road, causing a commotion and undoubtedly endangering everyone’s lives—and not even realising it in his eagerness to get to the gazebo. You attempted to raise your hand in apology to the cyclists, but quickly realised that the smile on your face likely made the gesture seem mocking.

It occurred to you that you and Jungkook were being very disruptive today, very annoying, very much in everyone’s faces about your relationship. And you realised, as he pulled you past the groups of people running from the rain, that you did not actually mind this all that much. Or at all.

There was a certain beauty in the unapologetic way that people in love behaved in public—grinning at their phones, kissing at bus stops, holding hands on narrow streets barely wide enough for one person. Running across the park in the rain and stumbling into every puddle possible.

When you and Jungkook finally reached the gazebo, you were both drenched and breathless. And you realised, belatedly, that it was not a suitable shelter at all: there were no railings or benches, the roof was not only crooked, but obviously decaying, and the rain splattered you if you got too close to the edge.

But you’d been here before: caught in the rain on your way to the restaurant for your first date seven years ago, seeking refuge under a much sturdier roof of a similar gazebo in an empty park, while the vividly green trees—almost a rarity so late in September—whispered wearily from the heavy rain on their leaves.

You’d been here before, and you did not want to go anywhere else.

“I’m starting to think,” you began, “that there’s something about us that attracts rain.”

Jungkook was thinking this very thought and laughed so heartily that the rain stopped for just a second, shamed into silence by a sound far more charming than the eager pitter-patter against the roof.

“You think we could make some money out of it?” he joked, his eyes energetic. “Maybe add a little performance to it? Rain dance?”

“We might have accidentally performed one already,” you said, stepping closer to the edge of the gazebo to watch the raindrops splash against the damp ground.

“You’re right,” he agreed, taking your hand in his and guiding you to face him. “Let me see.”

He brought your hand to his chest and you watched, puzzled, as he closed his eyes and pretended to concentrate very hard on the sounds around him. People across the street screeched as they ran from the rain. A stubborn gull was screeching in the exact same way somewhere overhead.

Jungkook clutched your hand tighter and hummed. He was joking, clearly putting up a show, but you heard the faint sound of distant thunder, and the joy on his face turned luminous.

“I knew it!” he exclaimed as you laughed, and the rain, encouraged by your approval, began to pour even harder.

You watched him revel in this delightful coincidence—or an elusive sign—and allowed his radiant smile to bring back the memories that you had locked away in a box you didn’t dare touch unless you were half-asleep.

It had been raining on your first date seven years ago, but it had also been raining when he suggested that date. You’d felt invincible then, the only one staying dry in the whole world, as you nearly sprinted home from the party where he’d asked you out. You stumbled over the threshold of your dorm room, your shoes wet and slippery, and landed on your knees, shouting the news to your roommate, who was startled out of bed by your loud entrance.

This was the beginning of the happiness you’d felt almost every day since then. But this happiness came with a price: you would come to class and you could not rest, could not find it in yourself to calm down, until Jungkook arrived and took his usual seat behind you. You wouldn’t even have to look, you’d always know he had come because you’d feel a sudden sense of peace—and then you’d lock eyes with him across the room.

For years after this, even today, when you tried to find a period of your life where you’d felt the happiest, these were the moments that your mind returned to.

“What are you thinking?” Jungkook asked, brushing a damp strand of hair from your cheek and bringing your focus back to the rainy moment with his touch.

“It—it’s been seven years and now we’re back in the rain,” you replied, distracted by the lingering echo of the years that have passed outside this gazebo. “Nothing’s changed.”

A faint smile danced on his lips.

“Yeah. Nothing important has,” he agreed. “I still love you.”

You met his gaze, a little thrown off. “W-what do you mean, still? That was our first date seven years ago.”

“Yeah,” he said, raising his eyebrows at the confusion on your face. “Oh, did you think I asked you out right after I saw you? No, no. I spent a whole year absolutely fucking pining after you before I finally mustered the courage to ask you out.”

You assumed he might have liked you a little, based on the way he’d introduced himself to you. But you obviously didn’t know about his alleged year-long pining that preceded your first date. And you weren’t sure if you wanted to believe him, given your own year-long pining. It made little sense for the two of you to like each other for so long and not do anything about it.

On the other hand, considering the past few years, perhaps it made perfect sense.

Your heartbeat had sped up, so you argued childishly, “no, you didn’t.”

“I did. Ask anyone,” he said, grinning. He wasn’t as embarrassed about this as he used to be—and your surprise made it easier for him to admit everything. “I never knew how to love you quietly. But it still took me ages to talk to you even with everyone’s encouragement. And that, uh—our first conversation didn’t go very well.”

“Wait—what do you mean? It went very well,” you disagreed. “I remember everything you said word for word. ‘We have Sociology together, I saw you sleeping in class, very cute by the way, the professor does not know how to shut up, have you seen that new Studio Ghibli film, I recently watched their classic with some friends, My Neighbour Jungkook, I’m Totoro by the way, I thought maybe—wait—no—’”

He interrupted you once your smile had grown dangerously wide. “Don’t you dare make fun of me.”

“I would never!” you said through laughter. “I think I knew I was in it for life the moment you said all that.”

He had to look down because the bees inside him had multiplied, spreading rapidly to his head and his lungs and his stomach, and he was a little concerned that he’d start buzzing, too.

“Not one period, nothing,” you continued, a melancholic haze in your eyes. “Just commas and an endless stream of thought. You could have asked me to bury a body, I would have said yes.”

He smiled, but everything inside of him was turning upside down, returning to normal, then turning downside up.

Every time he remembered how he approached you seven years ago, he either felt a little uncomfortable or completely mortified. He’d never thought you’d remember that day so well and with such fondness.

“By the way,” you added when he did not speak, “you did look a little like you were about to confess to accidentally murdering my roommate when you started to speak.”

This finally made him chuckle, and he felt his skin thaw from the frozen state of amazement. He remembered hoping that you’d forget all about what he’d said that day. Now he realised he had never felt more thrilled that you remembered.

“I know,” he said. “I was shaking.”

“Yeah. I, um—” you trailed off, needing another minute. “I had a crush on you, too, actually. For a long while.”

His smile faded, replaced by a look of criminal disbelief. “You did not.”

You recognised your own suspicion in his words and smiled. However, unlike Jungkook, who owned up to his stressful pining and memorable first impression, you did not feel ready to confess to your silent sulking quite as easily.

“I did,” you said. “But you turned away every time I looked at you on campus, so I thought, oh, okay. That guy hates me for some reason. Nevermind.”

“I didn—I never—”

“I actually made a playlist before we met,” you added quickly before you could change your mind. “And I, uh, kept updating it throughout our relationship.”

You did not look at him when you said this, so you missed the befuddled look on his face.

“A pl—you made a playlist?” he repeated, his thoughts momentarily derailed. He couldn’t even hear the rain anymore. “And you never told me?”

“And I will continue to act like you don’t know about it,” you said.

He was too ecstatic to care. He hadn’t dared to imagine that he would have such a strong presence in your thoughts that you would create a playlist about him—for him? (he thought he might faint)—before you even met.

“No, b-but I’m supposed to be the one making grand gestures in our relationship, and you have a playlist about me? Ab-about us?” he questioned, almost frantic. “Is it—well, what songs are in it? About our relationship?”

You tried to put your words together, your slow, calculated breaths a stark contrast against his passionate energy. Another clap of thunder, unusually intense, rumbled in the sky.

“Sort of,” you finally answered. You thought that a playlist did not come anywhere close to everything he’d done and attempted to do for you, but you still struggled to articulate yourself. “Or songs that we both liked. Songs that we listened to together. Songs that we discovered on roadtrips—just, uh, stuff like that.”

He shook his head, every part of his skin itching with an unfathomable urge to hear these songs.

“You have to let me listen to it,” he stated.

“No,” you said, giving a determined shake of your head. “It’s enough that you know it exists.”

“I will absolutely never shut up about this,” he retorted, gesturing with his hands to emphasise his commitment to being annoying, “and I might end up telling more people.”

“I will kill you if I have to,” you warned.

“So I will haunt you, then,” he returned. “Is it on Spotify?”

You narrowed your eyes. “It’s private.”

“I am not above pulling a Sid and stealing your phone,” he said, resolute.

You snorted despite yourself.

“Okay. Fine,” you said. “Maybe I’ll give you the link after.”

Jungkook waited for further clarification, but you decided you’d said enough.

He was confused. He no longer had any clear delineations of time in his life—ever since he found you again, his whole life had shifted to “after.”

“After—after Sid?” he asked.

“After everything,” you replied, unintentionally ominous as your gaze wandered to the fragmented reflections of the clouds on the rain-soaked pavement. “After we leave London. After we deal with the label. After it stops fucking raining every time we go out together.”

Jungkook thought he could already see these things: the Parisian streets after you’ve left Sid in London, the peace after you’ve told the label about your relationship, the sun in the sky after the rain lost its courage to threaten you again.

“Okay,” he relented, his features softening. “I’ll hold you to it.”

Your lips curved into a gentle smile. “I know you will.”

He hummed, stepping on a loose floorboard with the edge of his boot.

“Now, then,” he said, “tell me about this crush you supposedly had on me.”

“It was a crush,” you insisted, your voice growing more fervent right away.

Jungkook smiled but tried to remain collected. He had decided it was better for his sanity not to believe you.

“I liked you ever since I saw you at that first freshman party,” you continued and he realised that he was absolutely, without a doubt not collected at all. “I spent that entire night scrolling through the list of people invited to this event on Facebook until I found your profile. But I didn’t dare to send you a friend request, because—well, you know. We hadn’t talked or anything. I thought maybe you’re not interested.”

He thought his heart might stop because this freshman event was where he first saw you—and for every waking and sleeping moment since then, he had been interested.

“I noticed you around campus after that,” you continued. “And I would have talked to you first, I think. If you hadn’t looked like you dreamed of my violent death every time you met my eye.”

He groaned, rubbing his eyes with the pillows of his palms.

“Well, obviously, I liked you too much to look at you and not glare,” he said, even though none of that was obvious. “I actually thought I developed some sort of an allergy right when I first saw you.”

You raised your eyebrows. “An allergy?”

“Yeah. Shortness of breath, just feeling hot all over, sweating profusely,” he elaborated, moving his hands away from his face to reveal his faint, nostalgic smile. “That had never happened to me before. It was either the dust in the room or you. And there wasn’t a lot of dust.”

You pursed your lips before your cheeks could stretch any further.

“I don’t know,” you teased, “they don’t clean the building that well.”

“It was you,” he stated firmly. “Got my breath catching in my throat. Gave me butterflies, made my heart race—made me feel all the things that people write embarrassing bubblegum pop songs about.”

You looked down to collect yourself before all the signals that your heart was sending to your brain could reflect on your face.

“Catchy songs, though,” you murmured.

“Catchy, sure,” he agreed, his tone wistful. “Until all those things they sing about happen to you, and you feel like you’re drowning.”

You felt a little like you might drown just now as your heart pounded in your chest, angry at you for another wasted year.

“I’m really happy we finally ended up together,” he said. “Seven years ago, and today.”

You finally looked up at him and remembered all the times when you used to worry that you had already lived through your happiest moments, and any little joy you’d come across later would pale in comparison. You knew better now.

Jungkook was your happiest moment, and he was right here. He’d always been right here.

“I love you,” you said, a little suffocated by the overwhelming warmth in your chest. “I’ve loved you every day for all these years.”

He was smiling so widely that his lip ring dug into his stretched lips. He reached out to caress your cheek, resting his palm on the side of your face for a moment, his eyes bright and glittering.

He kissed you slowly, his bottom lip lingering between your lips while the rain washed the noise of the city away. He tasted love and longing on your tongue, and he had never in his life wished for the sunshine to stay away longer.

The rain listened. It had become a fundamental part of your present and a prophet of your future: the two of you were going to spend the rest of your lives listening to the rain and falling in love.

Since Rated Riot had a day off and the other members let you know where they were by bickering continuously in the groupchat, you and Jungkook locked yourselves in his hotel room when you returned.

You changed into dry clothes first, and then noticed that Sid still hadn’t replied to your text. In case he really hadn’t received it, you sent another one—with just question marks—hoping that he’d interpret your repeated messages as a sign of your desperation to talk to him.

You put your phone away and climbed back into bed. The sun had already set outside the window, casting faint, elongated shadows around you in the room. You and Jungkook listened to the music playing on his phone and returned to the snacks he had bought for your film night a few days earlier.

As the song switched to the latest Bad Omens collaboration, you closed your eyes to nod along, and he reached over to snatch a chocolate-covered cherry bonbon from you, causing a spark of static electricity to pass between you.

“Sorry,” he said, chuckling after he heard you gasp. “It’s from the bees, I think. They must have somehow electrified me.”

“Yeah, that’s definitely something that bees can do,” you played along, sitting up on the bed and unwrapping another candy for him. “Maybe you should take an ice bath to avoid these after-effects.”

He accepted the candy with a grin. “No. I like shocking you when I touch you.”

To be fair, he didn’t need bees or electricity for that—but you decided not to point that out.

You realised how much peace you felt here: listening to music and eating sweets with him across the bed from you. You didn’t think there was anything you still needed in life. Watching him close his eyes as the chocolate melted on his tongue, and hearing him hum with childlike delight as he swallowed, filled an emptiness inside of you that nothing—no trips abroad, no late-night drinks, no shopping sessions—could have filled.

This random moment in his hotel room was nothing at all, yet it was everything.

Suddenly, your phone buzzed, startling you both.

“Sid?” Jungkook asked eagerly, letting the remaining chocolate melt slowly on his fingers while you reached for your phone.

“No,” you replied, checking the screen. “It’s Maggie. She just posted the backstage pictures with our list.”

His expression tightened. “Oh.”

“There’s nothing from Sid,” you added.

Jungkook finally popped the rest of the candy into his mouth. He decided—quite abruptly—that he’s had enough discussions about Sid and everything you’ve been through because of him.

“You know what we should do?” he asked, licking the remnants of the chocolate off his fingers. “We should go to the sea after the tour ends.”

“Oh—we—yeah?” you asked, stumbling over your words. You thought it was very unfair of him to ask you this while running his tongue over his fingers all in the same breath. “We—but we don’t know when that’ll be.”

“Whenever,” he said with a shrug. “Let’s go.”

It took you half of a second to say “okay,” and he didn’t think he’d ever learn how to stop his heart from soaring every time your agreement came so quickly, so easily.

To be honest, you didn’t know why he even asked. It was fairly clear that there weren’t many instances where you would have refused him.

However, your response still painted his features with every warm hue in existence, and he settled back on the bed, resting his head on the pillows and closing his eyes. As you watched him, you were forced to acknowledge one more time that witnessing him like this should have required an admission ticket—and a sign reading, “do not touch the exhibit.”

“I feel like I have everything,” he said, unknowingly echoing every sentiment you felt. “I don’t even care if Sid replies to you and if our plan works.”

You leaned against the pillows on the other side of the bed and turned to your side to face him. “Yeah?”

“Mmhmm,” he replied, a melodious hum in his tone. He opened his eyes to meet yours and placed his hand on the pillow beneath his head. “We’re—you’re here with me. The tour is going well, it’s—that’s it. That’s my whole dream.”

He looked beautiful in an almost devastating way. He looked like every extravagant adjective that sounded made-up when you encountered it in writing for the first time: transfixing. Beguiling. Effulgent. Pulchritudinous.

You really wanted to touch the exhibit.

“Do you know how we formed Rated Riot?” he asked suddenly, distracting you.

You raised your eyebrows, then turned your gaze away. Jungkook realised you probably didn’t understand where his question had come from, but you didn’t ask him anything, so he did not explain.

Truthfully, you did not know the complete story behind how Rated Riot got together. You only knew what each of the boys was doing when they first met.

“I don’t know much,” you admitted. “I know that Hoseok kicked things off.”

“Yeah.” Jungkook nodded, then stopped. “Or maybe Namjoon, actually? Because Namjoon saw Hoseok at some gig that he went to. When he asked about his band, Hoseok gave him, like, fifteen business cards. But even though he filled in for all these bands, it was still only maybe one gig per week. That’s nothing. So, Namjoon told him he’s too talented for that shit. He said he needed his own band.”

You recalled Yoongi mentioning that Namjoon was the first producer that Rated Riot have worked with, but you hadn’t realised this was before the band was even formed.

Suddenly, the broken air conditioner in the room whirred back to life, interrupting your thoughts.

“S-so, they started talking,” Jungkook said, momentarily distracted by the loud noise. “Hoseok wanted to be independent, and Namjoon didn’t push him to sign with Jett Records back then. He helped him. Unofficially, I guess. They found Taehyung very randomly at this one after-party for somebody at our label—well, our future label. Namjoon took Hoseok there to network, and Taehyung just happened to be there. No one knows why, but you know Taehyung. He’s always going to be right where he needs to be.”

“Yeah,” you said, nodding knowingly. Taehyung always seemed to find his way to the people and places meant for him.

“Yeah, so he was at that party,” Jungkook continued, “and he overheard Namjoon and Hoseok discussing the plan for Hoseok’s band. They were saying that they needed a bassist first. And Taehyung just chimed in like, “I play bass.” Just out of the blue. Namjoon asked him who he was, and he introduced himself. Namjoon then asked what he was doing here, and Taehyung said, “I’ll tell you if you let me join the band”—which he never did, by the way. We still don’t know what he was doing at that party.”

You chuckled softly. Knowing Taehyung, nothing in this story surprised you, but you were still impressed by how quickly his energy captivated Hoseok and Namjoon.

“So, they let him join?” you asked.

“Namjoon claims he auditioned for them first,” Jungkook said, clicking his lips questioningly. “But one time when Hoseok was very drunk, he admitted that he’d felt desperate. Namjoon was busy and couldn’t help him much, so Hoseok had to figure things out on his own. He said he called and invited Taehyung to join right away. He thought they could find a proper bassist later, and Taehyung could fill the spot for the time being. Funny.”

“Oh,” you said. “Because he hadn’t heard him play yet?”

“Yeah,” he confirmed. “He hadn’t seen Taehyung even holding a bass before. So, he had doubts. I guess I get that. Anyway. He invited Namjoon to their first rehearsal and Taehyung blew Namjoon the fuck away. That’s it. Hoseok said that after that, he was worried Namjoon would sign Taehyung and leave him behind. Not that Namjoon would do that, but uh—yeah. Taehyung was that good.”

“They’re both that good,” you said. “Hoseok never acknowledges his own talent.”

“Right?” he nodded eagerly, turning to his side to look at you. There was a warm smile on your lips that Jungkook really enjoyed. “They’re both amazing.”

“So, how do you come into the picture?” you asked.

He took a breath before answering.

“I saw Hoseok and Taehyung playing at this dive bar that Sid dragged me to,” he said.

Your eyebrows arched in surprise. “No shit?”

“Yeah,” he said, running his tongue over his lips. “He said I was annoying and mopey, so he kept taking me to a new place every night. There were hardly any people at this bar that night. Taehyung was singing, but he sang, like, one verse, and then they launched into the longest instrumental break I’ve ever fucking heard. And it was incredible. Shit, I—I’m more into vocal music. But seeing Hoseok and Taehyung play together—there was another guitarist with them, actually, I don’t even know who it was—anyway. It made me realise how powerful instrumental music can be on its own.”

A dreamy fog had descended upon his face, and only now did you realise that the air conditioner had stopped working again, seemingly calling it a day. You appreciated the silence and the way Jungkook looked when he played back the memories in his head, his eyes shimmering with the bright lights and the sounds of the bar that night.

“I didn’t know that Sid met the other members before you joined the band,” you said.

“Oh, yeah,” he replied. “He also said he could be a better bassist than ‘that guy.’”

“He—of course,” you groaned. “Wait until Luna hears this. She’ll take care of Sid for us on Taehyung’s behalf, I think.”

He nodded, snickering. “I bet. But Sid actually left the bar before they finished their set. I stayed back. After they wrapped up, I went up to Hoseok at the bar and told him how much I enjoyed their performance. Told him I was thinking of picking up drums—”

He paused abruptly, noticing your surprise before you remembered him mentioning this to you.

“Oh, was this when you and Sid were planning to start your own band?” you asked. You had assumed they were joking.

“Yeah,” he replied, snickering. He had been joking, but he still found drummers to be effortlessly cool. “So, Hoseok delivered the longest fucking speech about what his job was like. Don’t ask him about it, by the way, or you’ll have to sit through three hours of him making drum sounds. But anyway, I was pretty drunk by then, and I don’t know, I guess I hummed along to some song that was playing or something.”

You nodded. Jungkook was almost always humming something.

“Then Hoseok said they needed a vocalist for their band,” he continued, “because Taehyung didn’t want to do it. And he noticed me humming, so he jokingly asked if I happened to sing. I said sometimes, nothing serious. Everybody sings sometimes. He told me to sing something for him. I told him to get fucked, we’re in a bar.” Jungkook had to pause here to let you finish laughing. “And Hoseok just shrugged, like, “no one’s at the mic, why not?””

“That did it for you?” you asked.

He nodded. “That fucking did it for me.”

You laughed again, knowing that he would never shy away from anything that resembled a challenge.

“What did you sing?” you asked.

Jungkook gave you a look. There was only one song that always lingered at the back of his mind. You could have guessed it, really, but you were a little frightened about its significance in this context.

“You—you sang Biffy Clyro?” Your throat was dry all of a sudden and useless questions continued to pour out of your dumbfounded chest. “At that bar? In front of Hoseok? “M-Many of Horror?””

“Of course,” Jungkook said, as if there had never been any other song he could have chosen to perform that night, besides the one that followed you and him throughout your relationship. “It—it really fucked with me, though. We had just broken up maybe a month ago, so it was still fresh, you know? And this was my first time singing “Many of Horror” in public, on top of that. And I was—I didn’t do well. I think I missed half the lyrics in the last chorus because it was too much.”

He snickered lightly, trying to lessen the impact of his words. You felt frozen.

“I-I was standing there,” he continued, and you could almost see it, “hiccuping to the I still believe, it’s you and me ‘til the end of time, while Hoseok just watched me, expressionless. And then I drank half the bar right after I got off stage.”

He sang the two lines of the song as he shared the story, his voice quiet and tender, and you thought you must have resembled Hoseok right now—so lost in all the emotions brewing inside you that you did not immediately realise he had stopped speaking, and it might have been appropriate for you to reply.

“Y-you still sounded great, though,” you managed. “Obviously.”

“Yeah, maybe four people clapped. Out of the ten or so at the bar,” he said, chuckling. “Hoseok told me he had to make a call, told me to stay right where I was, and then he disappeared. He returned twenty minutes later with some dishevelled guy in a turtleneck with a little hole in the collar.”

You recognised the description. “Namjoon?”

“Namjoon,” Jungkook confirmed, the smile on his face matching the one hesitantly spreading on yours. “I was fucking wasted. They were saying I had to meet with them for rehearsals, they wanted to see how I’d sound with them. And I’m—I couldn’t fucking think straight. They were telling me they wanted me to join the band, and all I could think about was that you weren’t here.”

The excitement in your eyes quickly turned into pain as a sharp twinge of longing pierced through your chest. It cut into every open crevice of your heart, reminding you of the way it had bled in those first few months after you broke up—even on this particular day, while Jungkook was struggling to get himself together in the face of his future, and you were likely at home, tossing and turning in your bed because you did not know what to do with yourself.

“I wanted to tell you so badly,” Jungkook admitted, his eyes fixed on the bedsheets, his voice filled with incorrigible regret. “But we weren’t talking anymore. I thought—there was this one moment where I thought, well, what’s the point? What’s the use of joining this band if I can’t even tell you about it? A-and they weren’t even a full group when I met them anyway. It took about two more weeks for Yoongi to join.”

You made a conscious effort to swallow the lump in your throat, and shifted your focus to Yoongi to allow for the sudden ache in your chest to subside.

“Yeah, uh—Yoongi mentioned that he was the last to join,” you commented, hoping to steer the conversation back to a less emotionally charged topic. “He used to play for a different band before, right?”

“Yeah. Somnia,” Jungkook said. The name did not sound familiar to you. “They weren’t—um, going anywhere. That’s a very blunt way to put it, but they were just stuck. And Yoongi and Namjoon go way back. So, Namjoon called him one day and lied that he was producing for this new, promising band in need of a permanent guitarist. Said they had a solid rhythm section, but their artistic direction needed some refinement.”

“And, uh,” your voice was a little lighter, “I assume they had a great vocalist, too?”

Jungkook smiled. “They did, yeah. I was trying to be modest, but you brought it up.”

You snickered, offering a nonchalant shrug. “Just trying to help you out.”

“Thanks,” he replied. “Yeah. So, Yoongi was the last one to join. He’d—he has a lot more creative freedom with us than he had with Somnia, which still isn’t a lot. But it’s something. And I think that was the main reason why he left them.”

“And they were okay with him leaving?” you asked.

Jungkook turned on his back and sighed.

“I assume they weren’t,” he said, briefly glancing at the ceiling before turning to look at you. “That’s why he doesn’t talk much about it.”

“Ah.” You nodded. “Makes sense.”

“Yeah, but anyway, Yoongi joined and we were complete,” Jungkook continued. “We released “Haunting” independently. That—okay, that was in June. Some time after that, this radio DJ that Yoongi knew played our song on his radio show as a birthday gift to Yoongi. Namjoon and Christian Jett—”

“CJ, apparently,” you cut in.

“Right. CJ,” he repeated. “They heard the song at some event. Apparently, CJ loved it, so Namjoon told him about us. When CJ found out we weren’t signed to a label, he reached out to us. It took Taehyung and me three days to convince Yoongi and Hoseok to go to that meeting. They both had some shitty experiences with record labels in the past. But we persuaded them to at least show up. CJ had us perform “Haunting” and “Cursed” for him, the only songs we had released at the time, and he signed us on the spot. Well, after Yoongi finished negotiating with him about our contracts.”

Your heart started to race as if you had just realised how much the universe had to align, how many intricate coincidences had to happen to lead Jungkook to his band, and to bring the two of you to this moment in his hotel room.

“We started working on our album,” he went on, “and about four months later—in July, right?—the record started to finally come together. That’s when CJ started to look for a manager for us.”

You took a breath and finished for him, “and reached out to me.”

“Yeah,” he said. “All CJ told us was that he found someone. He mentioned that this person was already working under the label and that the band they managed had recently broken up.”

You did not interrupt the silence that followed, because you thought that Jungkook had paused for a few seconds. But he stopped speaking altogether, waiting for you to share your perspective.

“I-I was, uh, Nick’s assistant at the time,” you said, realising what the silence was for. “We were working with The Jungle Will Get You.” You turned to Jungkook and he shook his head. “Yeah, they were—they weren’t popular. And the members weren’t really motivated, especially towards the end. They split up, eventually. Nick moved on to manage Reconnaissance, and I took on administrative tasks for various bands under the label. It was only for a few months, but I thought I’d end up buried in endless piles of papers. So, when HR called me in to tell me about Rated Riot, I pretended to know exactly who you were to get that job.”

He was smiling next to you on the bed, lost in the memories that did not hurt anymore now that he shared them with you.

“I doubt even HR knew who we were,” he said, gazing up at the ceiling and clasping his hands on his stomach. “I’m just—I’m constantly—I don’t know. I can’t wrap my head around the fact that it was you that they chose for us. I mean, you’re amazing, you could have worked with any band out there. But they picked you for us.”

You grappled with the same impossible coincidence.

“I’m thinking about that, too,” you said. “You had so much potential and CJ... I wasn’t sure if he even saw it when he reached out to me. Not to mention, you and I were—we were broken up for two years at that point?”

“A year and seven months,” Jungkook replied.

“Right,” you said, slightly out of breath from the precision of his answer.

He turned to face you. “Did you ever consider turning down that offer to work with us after you found out I’m in the band?”

You exhaled what little oxygen you had left in your lungs. You’d considered many things when you saw him again that day, and you realised now that you still hadn’t fully grasped all the thoughts that had passed through your mind at the time.

“For maybe half a second,” you said. “I was very confident that we could move on from our relationship.”

He grinned. “Look how well that worked out for us.”

“Mhmm, right?” you agreed, meeting his gaze. “So professional.”

He chuckled, intoxicated by your proximity and the peace he found in the knowledge that the universe had put in a good effort to lead you two here.

“I know that—well, it seems like everything just fell into place to get all of you together for Rated Riot,” you said. “But it wasn’t that easy for you guys, was it?”

“Yeah, no, it definitely wasn’t,” he agreed. “After Yoongi joined, we struggled to write one fucking original song for months. We thought the band was going nowhere.”

You could see the sadness in his eyes. “It was that bad?”

“Yeah. Everything we tried to work on was shit,” he said. “We were getting drunk every night, trying to find something that could work as our first song. And nothing worked.”

“So, what happened?” you asked.

“You,” he answered simply.

Your brows creased. “How—what do you mean?”

“Namjoon pushed us to release something authentic for our debut single,” he began. “And the other guys decided to kick my ass and force me to work. They knew I was writing something, but it—it wasn’t anything serious. Not like what they write. You know I can’t just create shit on the spot. My lyrics have to be about something that I’ve been through. And you’re—you are every single meaningful experience that I have had in my life. The guys—they wanted to use that. So, you’re sort of the main reason why Rated Riot are where they are”

You exhaled slowly, your mind filled with thoughts just like it had been the first time you walked into Rated Riot’s meeting room and saw Jungkook there—looking only slightly different from the music video Luna had shown you before, and remarkably different from your memories.

“And that—this is why I brought this up now,” he said. “It’s all because of you. We broke up, and Sid dragged me to that bar to help me get over you. I sang our song to Hoseok, and he brought Namjoon to convince me to join the band. I wrote “Haunting” about you, and CJ heard it and decided to sign us. We put out several albums, filled with songs I’ve ever written for you, and now we’re on this tour. If it weren’t for you, I just—w-we wouldn’t be here.”

You felt your skin prickle, the sensation quickly turning to a painful sting, and you looked away. Frankly, you did not believe that your influence was this significant—not even after Jungkook had told you that it was. These events seemed like an unbelievable sequence of coincidences that he decided to treat as signs, and you found that you couldn’t breathe if you looked at them as signs, too.

You felt his eyes on you and only meant to glance at him very briefly, but he held your gaze for a few moments longer, watching as a shuddering breath passed your lips. Then he propped himself up on his elbows.

“I’m going to kiss you now,” he declared, the look in his eyes so final, so determined that you were almost afraid to move when you met his gaze. “And then I’m not letting you go. I don’t care if Sid texts.”

Your voice was very small. “I don’t care, either.”

“Fuck,” was more of an echo than a real whisper as his lips finally collided with yours. The kiss was deep and vehement and full of everything that had built up inside you over this day alone.

But then his tongue met yours and you realised that this day wasn’t all that special. You could have kissed him at any point of any day, and you would have still felt overwhelmed and aching, and you would have needed him right at the tips of your fingers as much as ever.

He tasted like the chocolate-covered cherry bonbons that he’d bought you because they reminded him of the summer nights you’d spent together. He tasted like the sticky homemade candy that the two of you baked when there were no other sweets in your dorm room and you craved something, but refused to leave, refused to pull away. Like the moments on the balcony of his house after you snuck away from his cousins. Like the rainy walks to class when your hair would be sticking to your face, but you couldn’t stop smiling, couldn’t stop looking at each other.

All the thoughts that had been screaming at you for the past fifteen minutes suddenly quieted down as he leaned closer until he was hovering over you, one of his hands on the side of your face.

He felt shivers on the back of his neck when your tentative fingers found their way to his hair. He exhaled softly against your mouth and stilled momentarily when he heard your quiet whimper in response to his kiss, to his breathing, to him.

The room suddenly spun completely out of control around him.

He needed you so much and for such a long time that every time you were with him, every time you kissed him, he worried that he was dreaming again. So he kissed you harder, held onto you tighter—not wanting to find out if he was asleep, not wanting to wake up.

He unbuttoned your denim jacket without pulling away and slid it off your arms, holding the side of your neck with one of his hands. His kiss was so deep, so riveting that you felt your lungs give up, felt them pack up and leave, forcing you to breathe him instead.

His hands caressed your shoulders, finding the straps of your shirt and sliding them down your arms—and then stopping abruptly when he realised that you weren’t wearing anything underneath.

Exhaling shakily, he pulled back—lightheaded and winded and completely obsessed with you—just to look at you for a minute. There was a playful grin on his lips when he kissed you again.

You pulled away enough to ask, “what?”

“Nothing,” he murmured in-between kisses, “you’re fucking perfect. But I want this off.”

He pulled you closer and you instinctively bucked your hips off the bed, causing a momentary hitch in his breath. He lifted the hem of your shirt, pulling the material up and tracing the invisible symbols on your skin along your ribs, your chest, and your arms. Tossing your shirt aside without looking, he leaned back in, yearning for the feel of your lips on his again and accepting that he could not last one minute without you. Perhaps not even one second.

He felt your hand on his chest, trailing down to the edge of his black t-shirt and distracting him from the kiss with the softness of your touch. You lifted his shirt up to his chest—as far as it would go without breaking the kiss—and felt him hiss at the cold sensation of your bare fingertips on his stomach.

“I’m sorr—” you began, but the second you pulled away to apologise, he leaned in to capture your lips in another kiss.

“No.” His whispers were frenzied against your lips. You could have electrocuted him with your touch, sliced him into pieces with your fingers, and he would have thanked you for it. “No. You—d-don’t apologise. You’re perfect.”

He heard the way you cursed under your breath—under his breath, too—and he found it hard to inhale against the pressure in his stomach, against the tightness in his jeans. He was humming with near desperation when you pulled him closer, running your hands over his arms, your touch gentle enough to truly kill him.

He was frantic, eager to touch you, to feel your arms, your thighs, your chest, your neck—all of you—before someone interrupted you. Before his time with you ended. He knew he had the rest of his life to spend with you, but now he worried it still wouldn’t be enough.

His tongue moved over yours, his kiss deep, rushing, dizzying. He did not need to look to find the button on your pants, unclasp it, and slide the rough material down your thighs, swallowing a moan when he felt you shivering under his touch.

He quickly pulled his own shirt over his head and tossed it aside before kissing you again, high on the sound of your lips smacking against each other. He shuddered when your hands unexpectedly met his on the belt of his jeans.

“Let me do it,” you asked in a whisper—but he was wholeheartedly yours at that moment, and you didn’t even have to ask.

“Okay,” he complied, allowing you to gently push him back onto the bed.

Closing his eyes, he savoured the newfound sweetness from your kiss on his tongue. He felt you shuffle closer to him on the bed and had to take a sharp breath when one of your hands slid down his abdomen to his jeans.

You leaned over to kiss him again, and he broke—only capable of lying idly for so long—reaching for you and caressing your shoulders and your arms. He made it almost impossible for you to keep doing what you were doing; unruly wildfires blazed everywhere he touched you.

Jungkook was determined not to break the kiss even as you undid his belt and unzipped his jeans. He thought he did well. But then he lifted his hips off the bed to help you pull his jeans off and you brushed your fingers over the bulge in his boxers—your touch featherlight against the material—and he was very nearly finished.

He whimpered lightly into the kiss, his breaths growing heavier, his hands growing greedier. You made sure to hold one of his hands in yours to prevent him from flipping you over on the bed, and he responded to that by cheating: he held onto you tighter and attempted to pull you closer every time he gently bit your bottom lip and you got distracted by the pleasant sting.

Finally, you managed to slide his boxers down his thighs, catching each of his heavy breaths on your tongue. You pulled back, and he was about to protest until he saw you throw one of your legs over his, straddling his hips.

He watched you slide your panties down your legs while hovering over his thighs and he wasn’t sure how long ago he’d stopped blinking. Mesmerised by the sight, he didn’t immediately rush to assist you in maintaining your balance as you lifted one knee off the bed.

Once he recovered enough to remember to inhale, he sat up and pulled you flush to his chest. You gasped in surprise when he hooked his fingers behind the waistband of your panties and slid them down your legs faster.

“I said let me do it,” you reminded him with a pout, and he kissed you instead of replying, too impatient to wait.

Your hands slipped down his chest and your hips bucked into his just barely, but he exhaled deeply, breaking the kiss. You used the moment while he was dazed to push him back into the pillows.

He fell back on the bed, knowing very well that he’d been in this position before—with you on top of him, your fingers tracing over his length before finally wrapping around the base—but he still shivered, throwing his head back into the pillows. He still kept his eyes fixed on your face when you started to move your hand in gentle strokes, killing him a little more with each movement of your wrist.

“Fuck,” he sighed. “At least let—l-let me touch you.”

He phrased it like a request, but he did not mean it like one. You didn’t resist when he reached for you, his hands travelling over your thighs, lingering on your lower back, squeezing your ass, and pulling your hips into his.

One of your hands had come to rest on his chest for support while you continued to stroke his length in deliberately slow, languid motions. You could feel him getting harder under your touch, and you closed your eyes, your teeth sinking into your lip.

He could not look away from you. He wanted to be the one to bite your lips, but he couldn’t move close enough to you with your hands on him. He settled for exploring the skin on your hips, sliding his hands up and down your thighs. Soon, you felt the tips of his fingers brush lightly over your stomach and then descend lower to slip between your folds.

He exhaled deeply through his mouth when he felt how wet you were, and that was enough for him—he would have found a way to hold you tightly against his chest even if you were across the world from him.

In a flash, he was sitting up, connecting your lips again and bringing his tongue over yours while he gathered the wetness between your folds with his thumb. Your grip on his length tightened instinctively, and Jungkook groaned, automatically applying more pressure to the sensitive bundle of nerves on your clit—just enough to have you arch your back into him.

He felt you move faster, squeezing the base and speeding up until your fingers brushed over his tip. Trying to fight back a moan, he reflexively bucked his hips into your hand while two of his fingers teased your entrance, sliding over your wet folds in a teasing, tickling motion. You broke the kiss, sighing and dropping your head on his shoulder.

He didn’t give you much time to catch your breath—you didn’t give him any of that, so he thought this was only fair—as he kissed along your jaw, gently sucking on a spot on the nape of your neck. His fingers continued stimulating your clit with a combination of light, fast circles and harder, slower strokes that he knew would make you break for him.

“F-fuck, wait,” you exhaled, grabbing his wrist to stop his movements. “I w-want you.”

“You have me, my love,” he whispered back, running his tongue over the faint mark he’d left on the sensitive skin of your neck and humming, his tone gravelly and rasp, when you hissed at the feeling. “All of me.”

You gripped his wrist tighter. “Lie back.”

He didn’t immediately obey, opting to use his only free hand—the one you couldn’t hold, because you needed both hands to stop his determined fingers from drawing you any closer to the edge—to squeeze your ass and pull your hips over his length instead.

“Lie back,” you ordered again, your words firm, but breathless. It started a raging flame in his lower stomach, but he still resisted a little more—kissing you again, sucking on your tongue, sliding his hands over your thighs, and nearly making you lose it before he finally leaned back against the pile of pillows.

Jungkook still thought he was doing fairly well, considering the burning on his skin and inside him, but watching you unwrap a condom package and slide the latex down his length—torturously slowly, it seemed to him, to really test his limits—he thought he might lose it, after all.

You felt him jerk slightly in your hand, sensitive as you rolled the condom down his length, and your deep exhale blended with his sharp inhale. He locked the sound of your breathing somewhere deep in his mind, too focused on your touch to revel in it right now, but far too inspired by the response your body had to his to forget it altogether.

He bit his lip, his eyes locked on yours as you positioned yourself over his length. He was convinced that you were teasing him on purpose when you brought his tip closer to your entrance and then paused. He could already feel the wetness of your folds on him, and the second he lifted his hands to touch you, he was forced to let them drop in utter defeat when you finally slid his tip in.

“Fuck,” he whispered, his eyes rolling back at the feeling of your tight, warm walls as you struggled to take all of him in at once, and stopped, most cruelly, halfway in.

You looked breathtaking on top of him and there wasn’t a single coherent thought in his mind, so he couldn’t offer to help you anymore, couldn’t even guide you down on his length. He could barely stay still, biting his lip and clutching the sheets so he wouldn’t ram his hips into yours.

“You’ll kill me,” he whispered in a strained voice when you lifted your hips again, sliding his length over your folds, but not slipping it back inside.

Finally, you lowered yourself on him again, taking all of him in, inch by inch, and a soft sigh escaped your lips before you could stop yourself. “O-oh.”

You had to suppress another whimper when your hips met his, the stretch of his length stinging pleasantly. He hissed at the feeling, his hands flying to your hips to keep you in place.

His touch reminded you of Amsterdam suddenly: of the way he had held you, the way he had felt after all these years.

You wanted him so much that it no longer felt like a simple wish. He felt like a necessity and you could not understand how you’d ever managed to go on with your day when he wasn’t in the room with you.

You needed a moment to adjust to him and Jungkook watched you all through it. Even though he was barely able to keep his eyes open, he took in all of your reactions as the initial sting subsided and your hips twitched against his.

“Fuck,” he whispered. “Move for me, love. Please?”

You sighed as his endearing words—and the loving lilt in his voice—lit up your stomach and made you involuntarily clench around him. He groaned, digging his fingers into your hips. You had told him to lie back, but he wasn’t sure how much longer he could obey.

Finally, you began to move and he threw his head back, swallowing hard at the feeling. You rotated your hips in slow circles, allowing his entire length to delicately rub the walls inside you, and he could not remember when he’d last felt you like this. He could not remember anything outside this room, and when you rested both of your hands on his chest for balance, he seemed to forget his own name, too.

“Fuck,” was a soft, jagged breath that got caught in his throat as he watched you in the dimly lit room. His eyes had adjusted to the darkness enough to make out your silhouette, and he squeezed your ass tighter so he wouldn’t immediately lose it at the sight.

You drew back all of a sudden, placing one hand on his chest and resting the other against the mattress, right by his arm. You pulled your bottom lip in with your teeth as you lifted your hips, then slowly lowered yourself on him again. It took you a moment to find your rhythm, and Jungkook parted his lips, inhaling sharply through clenched teeth every time your thighs met his.

You shifted your weight to your knees to increase the pace and he nearly choked on his breath when you placed your hands on his shoulders and bounced your hips against his, his length gliding against your velvety walls.

“Y-you—oh, fuck. You look s-so beautiful,” he stammered, his hands travelling from your hips to your waist, then back down again.

Love and lust burned in his darkened eyes when he looked up at you, his hair falling in messy curls around his face. His chest rose and fell underneath you, the muscles on his abdomen tightening each time you sank down on him again.

You watched him like this and you changed your mind about describing him; an adjective that would fit him had not been invented yet.

You tried to respond to his words, but he suddenly lifted his hips off the bed to meet you halfway and knocked all breath out of your lungs, forcing a soft whine to pass your lips instead as you leaned into him, losing your balance.

It was starting to get too much—how deeply he reached inside of you, how tightly he held onto you—and Jungkook noticed it right away. Squeezing your hips, he adjusted his position by bending his knees for a better angle and bouncing you on his lap very slowly once, then twice, before pulling you into his chest and thrusting into you faster.

Curses and almost desperate whines fell from your lips, matching the rhythm of his skin slapping against yours. He knew he had hit your sweet spot when he felt your nails digging into his chest, when you tightened around him, when your strained breaths got louder, when your teeth grazed his collarbone—and he growled, gripping your hips tighter and trapping you against his chest with his other arm.

“Jungkook—” you panted, barely able to speak, and the sound of his name on your lips ignited the room around him.

He grunted softly and flipped you both to your sides, pulling your back into his chest by wrapping his arms around your waist and chest, his grip firm, deliberately inescapable, but his fingers gentle as he teased your nipples. His thrusts were slower at this new angle, but now they were deep and hard. It was your increased breathing and louder, uncontrollable chants of his name that encouraged him to speed up.

“Fuck,” he exhaled. And again, louder when you clenched around him, “f-fuck.”

This position allowed him to reach even deeper inside you and the way your walls sucked him in was as blissful as it was worrisome—he wanted this to last, and he didn’t think it would. Not when he had you so close to him, inhaling the scent of your apple shampoo, peppering breathy kisses on the side of your neck, feeling the goosebumps that he brought to your skin when he caressed your nipples, and thinking he might actually explode every time your body jolted against his with each one of his thrusts.

He slid one of his hands down your navel and kept his palm right above your entrance for a distracted minute, feeling himself move in and out of you, and groaning into your shoulder before lowering his hand to your clit. You writhed against him as he rubbed on a soft, gummy spot there, bringing you dangerously close to your high.

“Fuck, Jungkook,” you whimpered, almost helplessly clutching his arm that was wrapped around your chest. “I’m—s-so close.”

“I’m here, my love,” he whispered. “Come for me.”

Anything you were going to say died on your tongue when you felt his lips on your neck again. His fingers continued to massage the soft spot between your folds and your walls clenched and pulsated around him with each thrust of his hips. White clouds gathered on the edges of your vision and a low moan passed your lips as the knot in your stomach tightened.

Jungkook felt you tremble in his arms and pulled you into his chest harder. Keeping quiet had stopped being an option for you when he pressed on your clit with the pillows of his fingers, his hips continuously drilling into you—he remembered the spot you liked, and he made sure to hit it every time. He felt you tighten again, so close to your peak, and he relished in your loud whimpers.

Pulling his lip ring in with his teeth, he held you tightly against him to maintain a steady pace, his strokes assured and calculated, to push you completely over the edge. He fell impossibly more in love with you when his name got caught in your throat with your breath.

“Fuck, you’re so pretty,” he cooed as you writhed in his arms, coming down from your high. “S-so pretty—oh, fuck, my love—when you come for me.”

The anticipation of his own climax soon caused his hips to start moving with a certain frenzy, and he pulled all the way out before plunging himself into you again and fully bottoming out.

“Oh, fuck, fuck,” he grunted breathlessly, twitching inside of you.

His hips stilled completely and he cursed again, spilling himself into the condom. Groaning deeply, he drove his hips into yours instinctively, this way prolonging his pleasure and the time he spent watching you bite your lip in an attempt to stay quiet. He thought he heard you whisper a breathless I love you and he was convinced he came again just at the sound of it.

He buried his face into the crook of your neck and his voice cracked in the middle of his breathless chants, “fuck, I love you so much—I-I love you so fucking much—”

He still didn’t release his grip on you, lifting his head to kiss your neck again, while the two of you tried to recover and accepted, eventually, that you probably never truly would.

“Fuck,” he exhaled. Then, again, from the back of his throat, “fuck.”

You turned around as much as you could with his arms around you, and met his lips with your own, humming into the kiss and causing him to lose his sanity again—although, to be perfectly honest, he wasn’t sure if he’d even regained it yet.

Your bodies remained locked in an almost desperate embrace for another minute, your lips moving leisurely against each other as your breaths mingled and the room—but not your hearts—quieted down.

Unfortunately, you had to strain your neck to kiss him from this position, and Jungkook ended up having to let go of you. He pulled out carefully—the gentle contact still making you hiss from sensitivity—and helped you roll to your other side to face him.

After pressing another kiss to your lips, he grabbed a stray pillow and placed it next to your head. He touched your chin gently, prompting you to lift your head so he could slide the pillow underneath.

You smiled at the unnecessary, but very appreciated gesture. “I love you.”

His chest contemplated bursting.

“I love you,” he replied. “So much that I am not—I don’t want you to leave this room. Or my bed, actually. I want to stay with you every second of every day, and I’m okay if every court would qualify me as insane for that.”

You snickered into the pillow, your expression radiant. “I don’t think you’re insane.”

He grinned and got up to discard the condom before climbing back into bed.

“And I want to stay, too,” you added, closing your eyes.

He pressed a kiss to your cheek as he got comfortable on the bed. “Not just tonight, but always?”

“Of course,” you whispered, your voice turning lighter, “but I do have my own room.”

He settled in his spot next to you and draped an arm over your waist with a soft grunt. “Fuck if I knew why.”

He pulled back slightly to see your laughter. You didn’t seem like you were going to object or tell him that you should leave, but he still caressed your cheek, bringing his fingers over the smile lines by your lips that he had caused. His heart fought fiercely against his mind at the sight of them. He was almost ready to call Rated Riot’s next song “Smile Lines” and just sigh dreamily into the microphone for five minutes while Yoongi played gentle piano chords in the background.

“I think you should stay with me everywhere we go,” he said, leaning in to connect your lips in a deep, lingering kiss. His voice was a whisper against your mouth, “so we could do this again. And again. And again.”

You broke the kiss—and he would have been very upset about that, but you did that to laugh again, and he understandably forgot everything he was thinking of doing.

“You have a show tomorrow,” you reminded him gently, your eyes warm.

He shrugged. “So we’ll have to take a break for a few hours.”

You pressed your lips together, trying to contain your smile to an appropriate level. “Hmm.”

He rested his forehead against yours. “Sounds good?”

“You are messing with my head,” you whispered.

He grinned, pressing his lips to yours again. “I love you.”

You kissed him back but made sure to click your lips in feigned disapproval as you pulled away. “What did I just say?”

“You messed with mine first,” he countered, his quiet laughter blending with the warmth of your kiss.

He had already stolen all air from your lungs, robbed your mind of every thought you possessed before him, and kept your heart hostage—and now he was beaming like he knew very well he’d done all that. Like he wasn’t one bit sorry about ingraining himself in your life so much that it felt like you shared one soul, and it had stayed with him after you broke up: forcing him to suffer from the weight of it, while you searched for something missing inside you.

“I love you,” you said again. Your words were a whisper and they got lost on his tongue but found their way to his heart anyway.

Planting a few quick, butterfly kisses to your lips, he leaned back against the pillows, keeping his palm on the side of your face so he could rub gentle circles over your cheek with his thumb.

He loved you, and sometimes this love was all that he could think about.

Other times, however, the shadows in the room grew just a little darker.

“Sid hasn’t replied, huh?” he asked quietly, reluctantly.

You sighed, shaking your head. Your phone had been silent all night, and the more you tried to ignore the silence, the more noticeable it became.

“Should I text him?” he suggested. “To poke the bear a little.”

You frowned and felt your stomach sink—a feeling that Jungkook made even worse by pulling away from you and allowing for the brutal, cold air of the room to fill the space where his hand had been.

“What do you mean?” you asked, sitting up.

He rolled over to grab his phone from the nightstand.

You moved closer to be able to see the screen over his shoulder. You frowned the whole time, but it really did not take Jungkook more than a minute to compose a message that almost sparked an argument between the two of you.

After some relatively mild back and forth—consisting of your annoyed, “I told you I want to keep you out of this” that was followed immediately by his melodramatic, “I’m doing this because I love you”—the two of you reached a compromise.

Look, his text to Sid read. I know you’ve been texting my girlfriend. Stop. Let’s keep this shit between us.

This wasn’t the full truth. After sending you a few mocking texts after he posted that picture to his Instagram, Sid hadn’t texted you anything else. You weren’t sure if this would even provoke a response, but Jungkook was convinced. He sent the text and pulled you back onto the pillows despite your protests.

“I’m sure it’ll only be a few minutes,” he said. “Until he texts you.”

Sure enough, he did.

Just as you lied down next to Jungkook, just as he intertwined your hands, his fingers toying with yours, just as you were about to forget your phone altogether—just then, the text finally came.

Your eyes widened, but Jungkook had the decency not to gloat. Instead, he wrapped his arms around you until the beating of your heart returned to a reasonable pace. Then he let you sit up again and reach for your phone.

Sid’s message read, “eager to talk to me now?:)” and you breathed out a sigh of relief as soon as you showed the text to Jungkook.

“Alright,” you said, content. You didn’t even need to respond to him anymore, he’d already started the next step of your plan. “Now we’re good to go.”

Jungkook, smiled, nodding and extending his hand to pat the bed. You lied back down and he wrapped an arm around your waist, pulling you closer to feel your skin against his again. His breathing was soft on your neck and you smiled back, finally losing yourself in the calming darkness of his room and the warmth of his touch.

For one blissful minute, you focused on his breathing and traced the edges of his tattoos, and felt as though nothing bad, nothing hurtful or upsetting had ever happened to either of you.

“Will we be okay, do you think?” you asked wearily. “Tomorrow.”

He was taken aback by the question, you could tell from the way his breathing increased, but his response was quick and certain.

“We’re already okay,” he said. “Today and tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, and the day—”

“I love you,” you interjected softly, successfully stopping him.

“Thank you,” he said. “I would have kept going.”

You grinned. “I know you would have.”

He snickered, pulling you closer until you nestled your face into his neck and rested your hands on his chest, tapping, every now and then, to the beat of his heart.

“Sleep,” he whispered. “For a few hours, at least.”

You leaned your head back enough to press a gentle kiss on the corner of his lips instead of replying.

Jungkook hummed and melted into you, easing his grip to give you some space to breathe, but still remaining attached to you like he was a part of you and you were a part of him.

He could have stayed with you like this, he thought, for the rest of his life. And for at least a hundred more lives after that.

chapter title credits: sleep token, “give”

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venusjeon · 2 years

Text

rock god

you've got one year left to either finish your novitiate and become a nun like your parents always wanted, or leave the order and live a secular life like you've always wanted. but the fact that a sister's flirty nephew is staying in the convent for the summer provides a perfect distraction to such headache.

♔ PAIRING: rockstar!jungkook x novice!reader

♔ GENRE: 80s au, angst, smut, humour, fluff, s2f2l

♔ WORD COUNT: 16.3k another long one i'm sorry

♔ WARNINGS: minor characters death, religious themes, catholic guilt, smoking weed, swearing, sacrilege and exhibitionism: fingering in a church, profanity, blasphemy, quiet sex & loss of virginity (you're probably thinking girl AGAIN?), protected sex, betrayal, one mention of rape

♔ AUTHOR'S NOTE: for an atheist i do seem to write a lot about religion lol. the first song jk writes & performs for reader + the inspiration for the title is rock god by selena gomez, and the second one church by chase atlantic. i recommend you listen to them in advance☺️ also, we'll pretend jk is blond in the banner okay?

1986

The day was going incredibly slow, as all of last month’s had.

Most people would attribute that to the fact that you were a novice, but their idea of what that entailed was far from the reality. Contrary to popular belief and even if some sisters wished it was the case, cloistered nuns didn’t spend all day just praying. There were many other things to keep busy with in a convent, such as attending to one’s studies, doing household chores, or working to bring money in and keep the place going. Free time had never been the part of the day you looked the most forward to, though, until recently. Not that it got any better then.

Contradictory as though it was, you were kept from the present by the same plaguing thoughts you didn’t want to be left alone with… And sometimes, such as now, you didn’t have any choice but to force yourself back into reality, running late as you were.

The novice mistress Sister Daeun—that is, the one responsible for the training of the novices—had assigned you to fix the torn seams on your classmates’ habits that morning. Hey, someone had to do it. So off you ran through the cloister not to melt under the same sun others didn’t seem to mind.

Others being Jungkook and the group of girls who gathered around to listen to him play the guitar.

The presence of men wasn’t rare in your abbey, built some centuries back. It was sort of shut off from the rest of the world, hidden up in a mountain, but lost hikers always wandered into it and the abbot was more than happy to let them spend a night or two as guests, regardless of their gender.

Jungkook was a guest too.

He was in a rock band, or so you’d heard, and that career choice was why his parents had kicked him out, something you’d pity him for if he wasn’t always in a cheery mood whenever you chanced to see him around. Of course, what guy wouldn’t, surrounded by girls?

It didn’t bother you that some of your less spiritual sisters succumbed to his tattoos, long dyed blond hair, charming voice, and piercings. Their parents would doubtlessly tell them to stay away from someone who looked like a delinquent—your conscience did too—but then again, they were the ones who’d forcefully made them join the order, so you understood where the girls’ disobedience came from. On a personal level, in fact.

Though not because of the same reason, you weren’t there willingly either.

Unlike theirs, your behaviour wasn’t scandalous in any way and there was no need for you to be schooled in rectitude, no. This was just the path your parents had wanted you to take since you were little and you’d resigned to comply, however unhappy it made you. It wasn’t that you wouldn’t make a good nun, devout as you’d been raised and actually enjoyed being, but it wasn’t your calling.

Leaving the lively cloister behind and trying to do the same with your affliction, you rushed to your destination.

About three hours later, you were still sat in front of the sewing machine in the otherwise empty laundry room, humming on a loop the part of the song Jungkook had been playing earlier. You couldn’t deny it was catchy... Besides, you needed a tune to distract you from the machine’s repetitive noise and the summer heat, or else you’d go crazy. Maybe you had already, given you’d failed to notice someone opening the creaky door and walking in.

“Hello?”

Startled, you raised your head to meet the eyes of the rockstar himself, filled with something akin to interest. “Oh, hi...”

Jungkook chuckled. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to sneak up on you.” Before you could kindly tell him not to worry, that it was your fault for spacing out, he grabbed the hem of his shirt to show you the hole in it that until then you hadn’t caught sight of. “I was told to come here to get this fixed?” He then glanced at the dozen habits lying on the table you still had to work on, and changed his mind not to burden you, “But I can come another time– Or not at all! I mean, ripped clothes are trendy, aren’t they?”

For the first time in a while, you laughed genuinely and not out of courtesy, “I wouldn’t know, there’s not much variety in a novice’s wardrobe.” Since Jungkook’s t-shirt would just take a moment to mend and you didn’t mind helping him, you decided to neglect your current task without a second thought, holding out your hand with a smile. “It’s alright, really!”

“You’re an angel.” He smiled back as he took off his t-shirt, exposing a toned body you weren’t prepared for. Bet he says that to all the girls, intruded a thought in your mind as though to make go away the uplift of his compliment, but you brushed it off before he reached the table. “By the way, was that my song you were just humming?”

“Oh? I heard you sing it earlier, but I didn’t know it was yours,” you said while getting to work. Meanwhile, Jungkook leaned against the door’s frame. “I don’t really listen to music much.”

“What?!” He was utterly shocked, eyes wide like he’d seen a ghost. “That’s the greatest sin of all! I’ll have a serious conversation with the abbot, they’re not teaching you girls the important stuff here.” Father Jimin would certainly be amused at such a request. “But I did see you running earlier in the cloister, now that I think about it. It is hot, Y/N, but I don’t believe the floor is in flames.”

He knows my name? What a stupid question. Whoever had told him to come to the laundry room must have seen you entering it and mentioned you’d be there.

“Yeah, I was late, had overslept. It probably looked like someone was chasing me… Nun on the run!” you rhymed out of nowhere. “There’s a title for your next single.”

“If naming my songs will get you to listen to them, I’m down.” You looked up from the task at hand to ask him if that meant he’d credit ‘Sister Y/N’ as a songwriter, but the sight of someone walking down the hallway towards the laundry room scared the words away. “You know, you’re too pretty to be a nun.”

Sister Daeun, now right behind Jungkook, smacked the back of his head and asked, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Jungkook’s smile turned into a pout as he rubbed the spot. “Nothing, aunty. Ouch…”

Yes, he was her nephew, which was the main reason why Father Jimin had allowed him to stay not just for a few days, but the whole summer. Sister Daeun had promised on his behalf that as a thanks, he would help around to earn his bed and under no circumstances put in peril anyone’s vow of chastity. If he weren’t so good-looking, you imagined she wouldn’t have needed to make that promise.

“Y/N…” she sighed when she saw the pile of habits you had yet to fix the seams of. Despite the disappointment in her voice, she made sure to say tactfully, “It’s almost midday, I asked you to have all of them done before ten.”

Jungkook was the only one in the room who had no clue as to why you’d been working so slowly, but he didn’t hesitate to step forward when your head lowered in shame. “My bad, I’ve been distracting her for hours. And on top of it, I gave her more work…”

He approached the sewing machine, got his t-shirt, and put it on, all while you stared at him at a loss for words. Why would he take the blame? Sister Daeun started telling you to finish some other time and get ready for lunch, but you stopped listening, attention fixed on Jungkook as he discreetly winked at you before leaving.

That wasn’t the last time you met that day. Well, incorrect, because it was past midnight.

Like many nights before, guilt stirred a restlessness that kept you from falling asleep, the only solution you could think of being walking around the empty abbey in the hope of tiring your body and with it, your brain. It wasn’t that easy, though, often hours how long you’d wander about, always ending up at the cloister. Sitting on the stone base between the columns and gazing up at the stars brought some peace to you. More than praying, it appeared.

That night, such peace was disrupted when barely after ten minutes of it, the sound of a lighter being flicked made your head whip around.

“So you do have hair,” Jungkook joked as he sat against a column, bending one knee so he could rest his elbow on it. Although a bit embarrassed you were in your pyjamas and thus wearing no white veil that covered your head in front of a guy you didn’t know, you did the same on the next column to be able to face him. “Can’t sleep either?”

“Lately, not.”

He puffed at his joint before offering it to you, and a short laugh broke through your lips. Was he seriously tempting a novice to burn one with him? To be fair, he did mean to help you sleep, but it was still a bit… much for you. “I’ll pass, thank you.”

“Yeah, probably not a good idea,” Jungkook nodded at his own words before taking another puff, blowing the smoke to a side so it wouldn’t reach you. “I don’t want your parents to make a complaint because there’s a bloke loose in the convent corrupting the nuns. Can’t afford to be kicked out of here, too,” he whispered the last bit, as though talking to himself.

“Don’t worry, that’s not happening.”

“Why not? Are you girls not allowed visits or something?”

“No, we are, it’s just… they died last month. Car crash.”

“Shit, I’m so sorry.” You could see in Jungkook’s wide eyes how much he regretted bringing them up. “That explains why you were out of sorts this morning... Agh, I can’t believe they’re still making you do work, what a bunch of heartless pricks! Not to mention class, I mean, isn’t it summer?”

His indignation for your sake came as a surprise. Ignorantly, you’d allowed prejudices to decide what kind of person Jungkook was before he got the chance to show you himself. The familiar guilt well-deservedly returned to grip your heart.

“Father Jimin actually had me switch jobs with some sisters so that I’d get to do less demanding stuff,” you came to the poor abbot’s defence. “It makes no difference, but he’s not to blame nothing can.”

"Doesn’t praying help?” He took another puff, lips curling into a smirk at the thought that next crossed his mind. “I thought nuns had a direct line with God.”

The truth was your relationship with the Lord had strained. As someone whose thoughts and desires couldn’t help but fall into sin over and over, you didn’t feel worthy of His comfort, or dared ask for guidance. His or anybody’s.

“I have to go through the telephonist angels first, I’m not an official nun yet.” The muscles of your face relaxed, gaze falling to your lap. “To be honest, I don’t think I want to be.”

Jungkook’s head cocked to a side. “Really? So, what are you doing here? You don’t strike me as the type forced by her p– uh, family.”

“I do like this place and what they’re teaching us, but I’m here because my parents wanted a saintly daughter who could put in a good word for them up there. I tried telling them once that I have dreams of my own, but it ended in an argument they had the last word in. Now that they’re dead, it’s like the topic is permanently sealed, I can never talk them out of it. And I mean, I love them, so how can I disappoint them? What would it say about me if I waited until my parents were dead to disobey them?”

Only after you finished venting did it dawn on you that perhaps you’d said too much. After all, what did Jungkook care? What did anyone?

“What’s your dream?”

The question took you aback, but you still answered, “I’d like to go to university, get married someday, have kids... Not be trapped inside these four walls for the rest of my life, you know?”

“I know exactly what you mean, trust me,” Jungkook said quietly before puffing at his joint again. “You’re free to leave, though, right? I don’t need to master-plan an escape?”

You hummed a laugh, mindful not to be loud enough to wake anyone up, given neither of you should be out of bed. There may or may not have been a curfew you were breaking, as well as a tradition called the Great Silence in which everyone kept quiet from the final liturgical prayer of the day until the earliest one the next morning. It was a rule often broken, especially by you, but that didn’t mean the abbey wasn’t dead silent.

“Anytime I want, yes, only next year I’m supposed to take my solemn vows.” Jungkook nodded but a slight frown gave away he didn’t know what that meant. “Poverty, chastity, and obedience? It’s like a wedding with Jesus. I can always divorce him, but that doesn’t mean marriage is a light affair.”

Most orders didn’t work like that. There were various stages one had to go through before becoming a professed nun: an optional aspirancy, then a postulancy, a novitiate, and finally, a juniorate. Since you’d gone to Catholic school all your life, you’d skipped the first, done no more than a few months of the second, were about to start the final year of the third, and would not be doing the fourth since your convent didn’t teach it. Instead of six more years of formation before taking your perpetual vows, then, you had only one.

“Damn, and here I thought I had the most fucked up horoscope of the year. Maybe we were born on the same month.”

“What do you mean?”

“Doesn’t everyone know my parents kicked me out because I want to be a rockstar?”

“Yeah...”

Once again, you’d assumed wrongly about him. That because of his profession and looks, he was a rebellious kid who hated his parents and was glad to be rid of them. You hadn’t even considered their shunning might be putting him through a hard time.

“Look, disappointing your parents beats living a miserable life just to please them, even if it sucks. One day we’ll be old, and I personally want to look back and not regret my youth, feel like I wasted it. I’m not gonna tell you what to do but if you want my opinion, getting out of here and chasing your dreams says no more than you’re in charge of your own life.”

You had no idea why after that, Jungkook had taken it as his mission to stick with you.

It was common knowledge that you’d barely uttered ten words since your parents’ accident, so all eyes were drawn like magnets when you engaged in conversation with him of all people for hours on end. Since you came from vastly different worlds, it surprised you too that even though his company didn’t lessen your guilt, it was the best way to distract you from it. And precisely, that was his intention.

He would sit next to you at meals, trying to convince the sisters around the table in all seriousness that because they were cloistered, they weren’t aware Earth had been invaded by aliens last year.

“Do you think we’re stupid?” a postulant asked, giggles escaping you at how ridiculous the conversation you were having was. “Some of us do go out sometimes, I think we would’ve noticed.”

“They want you to think everything’s normal because only an army of nuns can defeat them!”

“How do we know you’re not one of them, huh?” you played along, narrowing your eyes in suspicion while Jungkook placed a hand on his chest, feigning shock.

“Aunty will vouch for me but even if not, I can’t believe you’d doubt me. We’ve known each other for like, what, a week? That’s enough for me to follow you into battle.”

“Sorry but can’t be too careful during an alien invasion.”

“That I warned you about! Why would I say anything in the first place?”

“I’ve been here for many years,” an older nun chimed in from the other side of the table, making everyone turn their attention to her. She addressed Jungkook, “You’ve just reminded me why I joined the order.”

He blinked, dumbfounded. “Why, sister?”

“Men talk so much nonsense it makes my head hurt.”

To see Jungkook argue playfully about aliens and men with a seventy-year-old nun who was having none of his shit was an experience, but it wouldn’t be just that.

Like you’d told him, Father Jimin had allowed you to switch jobs. Your old one consisted of embellishing clothes with elaborate religious embroideries—hence why Sister Daeun had asked for your help with the torn habits—that would later be sold on a street market stall in town beside other products manufactured by your sisters, whereas your new one required almost no effort.

There was an old married couple nearby who ran a goat farm, and a small group of nuns from your convent helped them in exchange of a portion of the food they made, instead of a salary. Father Jimin was clearly trying his best to raise your spirits when he’d assigned you to tend to the cutest new-born goats, but it wasn’t until Jungkook tagged along and you saw him struggle with the baby bottles, spilling milk all over his clothes and cursing at the tiny animals, that the abbot’s goal was achieved.

“No, no, no, come back, you little shit!” He chased a hoppy kid around the barn, unable to contain that lovely high-pitched laugh.

“How are you making a mess out of literally the easiest thing in the world?” you teased from the bag of pine shavings you were sat on, another kid resting otherwise peacefully on your lap.

“That’s easy for you to say, I’ve got Psycho making me do cardio over here!”

“Try this one,” you giggled, motioning to the empty spot beside you with your head so Jungkook would sit down. When he did, you lay the kid on his lap carefully and brought the baby bottle to its mouth, both of you watching as it fed without any problem. “See?”

It didn’t take long for the milk to run out, after which you and Jungkook stroked the kid to sleep while the other one still hopped around, sharing a smile when your fingers accidentally brushed.

Because he’d tag along, you agreed to helping out in the kitchen on another day, as time was somehow bearable if he was there. But you were still going through the motions, your parents’ absence ever-present.

“What do you think?” Jungkook stirred you awake from your trance. “Bitchin’, right? The best thing you’ve ever heard?”

The song that got stuck in your head the day you met was playing on a boombox he’d brought from his van and put on the worktop while the two of you and three other sisters cooked lunch.

The girl you’d just heard, he had explained, was the band’s lead singer Amber, whom he sometimes joined apart from playing the guitar. There were also a Hoseok on the drums and a Taehyung on the bass. Bangtan, their name was. You’d never heard of them.

“I’m not sure about the lyrics,” meaning all the cursing and allusions to sex, which got your sisters flustered in the background, “but I like the tune.”

“The tune…”

“I’m just more used to church songs, is all.” Jungkook’s eyes lit up. “No.” You knew he was thinking exactly of blasting his rock songs in the middle of Mass.

“Why not?” he asked as a joke while trying to steal a couple of french fries from a dish. You slapped his hand before he could.

“Because Father Jimin will exile you, duh.”

“And don’t you think I’ll give up yet. I’ll be found outside your cell’s window playing music on my boombox until you agree to go out with me.” You should’ve cast away the heat before it reached your cheeks, as his flirting was obviously just for fun. Something he did with all girls and which meant nothing. “Better yet, I’ll write you a song.”

“I don’t think a novice is the perfect muse for a rock song, especially if it’s about…”

Jungkook shook his head. “I’ll keep it PG-13 for you, I promise.” He then grinned, rubbing his hands together. “I’ll start working on it tonight.”

You weren’t together at all times, though. No, you had class, he had work, sometimes you didn’t see him for whole days. Such was the case one cloudy afternoon around three weeks after first meeting, when Father Jimin approached you in the cloister. It had been a while since your last visit to his confessional box, so you feared a scolding.

“I wanted to talk to you, actually,” he said with that distinctive, soothing voice of his as you walked together, “about Jungkook.”

Your heart missed a beat for a reason that escaped your knowledge. It felt, somehow, as though you’d been caught doing something you shouldn’t. “What about him, Father?”

“I hadn’t seen you smile for a while and now it’s all you do when he’s by your side. I know the past month has been very difficult, so it makes me happy to see you get through the loss of your parents, Y/N.” Did it really look like things were fine? Well, better that than having everyone worry about you until things got fixed, if that ever happened. “However,” Father Jimin continued, “as your Spiritual Director, it’s my duty to advise you not to rely too much on someone other than God for solace. There’s a reason for enclosure, so that the outside world doesn’t distract us from religion. Unless… you’ve reconsidered your life as a nun? There’d be nothing wrong with that.”

What Jungkook had told you that first night, you’d been chewing on ever since, but God and your parents had long won the war. ‘Honour thy father and thy mother’ was one of the Ten Commandments, after all.

“I have no doubts. I belong here.”

The last time you’d stepped in town had been for the funeral, but Bangtan was doing a gig at what Jungkook claimed was the coolest venue he’d ever been in and he’d managed to persuade the other members to perform Rock God, the song he’d pulled an all-nighter to write. You didn’t know what a title like that had to do with someone like you but apparently, the lyrics were from your point of view.

“You have to come,” he’d begged for the millionth time across the table the previous day, interrupting your Bible reading in the library. Luckily, nobody else was there, or had been before his arrival.

‘Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.’

Did that mean He would forgive you for the sin of going against your parents’ wishes? That you could hang the white veil and live how you dreamed of? The next passages from the Book of Isaiah answered those questions.

‘If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land: But if ye refuse and rebel, ye shall be devoured with the sword: for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.’

In other words, you were fucked. There was no way out.

“I’d have to ask Father Jimin for permission, and I don’t think he’d let me go to a rock concert.”

You’d laughed to yourself at the idea but Jungkook had been serious, insisted, “Tell him you want to go buy groceries or something, he won’t say no to you.”

“You mean, ‘lie to him because he’ll take pity on you.’”

“Please.” He’d sank his elbows on the table, leaning so close you almost had to back away. You would have, had he not bewitched you with the most angelic of smiles. “Do it for me? I’ll tell Saint Peter I made you do it so he lets you in Heaven.”

That’s how you ended up in the queue for his concert, holding a plastic bag full of stationary you’d told Father Jimin you needed for class.

Jungkook had given you no ticket, said telling the security guy your name would suffice, and surely enough ‘Sister Y/N’ got you in. The habit had wisely been left at home, but the man still frowned at your modest outfit before putting a wristband on you that was a different colour than everyone else’s. You assumed it meant you were VIP.

There was a secluded area with round tables near the stage you were indeed taken to, where only a handful of other people were hanging out, waiting for the show to begin. You wouldn’t have thought of approaching them, as there was likely nothing you had in common, with them or anyone in the whole poorly lit venue. If you were there, out of your comfort zone, it was for Jungkook only.

The lights at some point changed colours and finally, the concert began. Bangtan got on the stage and performed song after song, giving their all to an audience that cheered loudly. You cheered too, captivated by a Jungkook who made you feel things with every look he gave you.

His blond hair was wet, whether with water, product, or sweat you didn’t know, but it dripped down his curls to his ripped clothes which allowed a glimpse of the inked skin of his torso. When had he got new tattoos? They weren’t there the day he’d got his t-shirt off for you to sew. You had never paid much attention to those that covered his veiny right arm and hand, but now you found yourself tickled by the fact, and wanting to see them up close. Definitely the tattoos, not his bare body… But most tantalising of all was the passionate way he played his electric guitar, moving around the stage with a confidence that made it clear he belonged there.

With that confidence, though, came a cockiness that had him eye-fucking every pretty girl in the crowd. Who’s to say he didn’t write songs for them too? Not to mention Amber, to whom he sometimes got so close you feared they were going to kiss—as did their fans, judging by their screams of excitement.

The last song of the night was Rock God, which he made sure to announce by enthusiastically mouthing you ‘This is it!’. You braced yourself for the lyrics.

Preacher man walked into the club, and he said He said, "Hey girl, can't you walk and not stray?" Father, I'm torn and I'm selling my soul to the Rhythm, the beat and the bass 'Cause I can't confess my rock and roll ways (Ooh) 'Cause I'm so possessed with the music The music he plays

Was the preacher man supposed to be Father Jimin? He wasn’t likely to walk in the venue right then, but the idea of him attending a rock concert was so absurd it made you smile. You guessed the tone of the song before Amber had even got to the chorus.

I can't stop my feet from dancing to the sound of his drum (Oh no) I fell in love with my rock god I can't keep my hips from swaying to his sweet melody You see, I fell in love with my rock, rock god

Oh, so not only did you like his music in this narrative, but you were also in love with him? You raised an eyebrow at that, to which he failed to bite down a smile. There must be thrill in succeeding to seduce a novice.

The next verse was similar to the first one. Then came the chorus again, twice, but it was the bridge that struck you, putting an end to the fun you were having. Jungkook watched your reaction closely, as he had during the whole song.

No, I wouldn't change a thing even if I could 'Cause I chose a path and I'm not looking back And I'm sorry if I left the angels crying over me

The chorus was sung twice more but the music muffled into the back of your mind, the bridge’s words lingering in the foreground. Would you be able to choose a path that resulted in your angels weeping? How could you? And how could Jungkook portray you as remorseless over it, when the matter was eating away at you inside?

The show was over before you knew it, and the audience slowly exited the venue while the band got out of their rockstars outfits and makeup backstage. About fifteen minutes later, they came into the area you were sat in and Jungkook bumped fists with the friends who’d come to see him in a rush, so as to not keep you waiting any longer.

Checking out your collared shirt and ankle-length skirt while approaching, he whistled. “Gee, Y/N, I can’t handle myself when you dress so sexy.”

“Because a novice’s habit is so much better.”

“There’s an appeal to it. Makes a man want to tempt you.” Earning a smile from him, you rolled your eyes. “Thoughts on the song. Shoot.”

You pouted. “Full of blasphemies. Are you supposed to be the rock god?”

“Who else?” Jungkook asked surprised. How did that escape you?

“Then why do I say ‘sound of his drum’? You’re a guitar player. Are you trying to set me up with your bandmate?”

“‘Guitar’ doesn’t rhyme with ‘god’,” he said matter-of-factly, it hitting him in the pause that followed. You laughed. “Well, yeah, neither does ‘drum’… but it does a bit more, right?”

“A bit more, yes. So, are you and Amber dating?”

Jungkook smirked. “Jealous much?”

“If you are,” you ignored his question, “she might not be too happy her boyfriend’s writing songs to other girls.”

“She has a boyfriend,” he cleared up, lifting a weight off your chest. “We’re just friends, what we do onstage is part of the show. Don’t worry, you don’t have to fight anyone to keep me.”

“What a relief,” you joked, taking a deep breath before continuing. “Listen, I’m gonna get going, it’s late and you said you were getting some drinks with Bangtan, so I’ll leave you to it. I had fun tonight, you did great.”

“I can drive you to the convent,” he offered, but you shook your head, picking the plastic bag up from the table.

“It’s alright, Sisters Joan and Theresa are still at their stall in the street market. I’ll go back with them.”

“Swell…” he said under his breath, hoping you couldn’t tell he’d wanted to say ‘bummer’ instead.

You didn’t see each other until the next night, when you broke the curfew yet again to hang out in the kitchen. Sat on the table, the two of you discussed your dilemma while sipping at the awful tea Jungkook had made. There weren’t many ways to fuck up tea, but he’d still managed it, holding the old kettle responsible.

All had begun with him pointing out you’d paled towards the end of Rock God and you telling him the lyrics had moved you because you’d chosen to finish your novitiate. There was no way, therefore, you could sell your soul to the rhythm, the beat, and the bass.

“I know I said I wouldn’t tell you what to do, but–”

“You did.”

“But hear me out. Now that we’re friends, I can’t just watch you make a decision I know you already regret.”

“I’d regret leaving too, at least this is the selfless choice.”

“Well, aren’t you a good person!” Jungkook’s mocking made you sigh and sip on your tea like it were alcohol. It did taste as bad. “Y/N, you need to live for yourself, not for two fuddy-duddies who couldn’t put their daughter’s happiness before theirs.”

“Don’t be mean to them.”

Jungkook only bit his tongue because of your pleading tone. “Sorry… Even if you loved your parents, you can’t deny they put you in a tough spot. I’m sure wherever they are, they’ve realised they were wrong and want you to be happy however you choose.”

“The thing is, they were convinced I’d be happy as a nun, that I just wanted to switch to secular on a whim. That’s why they ordered me to stay, they were looking out for me.” Jungkook almost grimaced at the word ‘ordered’, fought against commenting how messed up was the fact that you were using it in this context. Staring at the almost empty mug on your lap, you wondered whether it was insensitive of you to speak your mind. “It’s also what’s happened to you that I couldn’t bear happening to me, even if my parents are gone. I don’t want to do anything that would make them spurn me. I don’t want them not to love me,” your voice broke despite your best efforts.

Jungkook immediately stole the mug from your fingers and put it next to his on the table, so he could hold your hands. “Listen to me, my parents are assholes. Like, genuine bad people who shouldn’t’ve been allowed to have a kid. I won’t tell you the things they’ve said and done to me because you’d cry, but they are a different breed. Normal parents love their children no matter what. Why do you think yours would spurn you if they were still alive, instead of realising that they were making you unhappy?”

Good point, actually. If only it wasn’t far more complicated than that…

The second Jungkook withdrew his hands, you missed their warmth, even though it was a hot summer night. He sipped at his tea, and you suspected he only mmm-ed with delight to make you laugh, given he bloody well knew its taste was disgusting. Idiot.

“Just promise me one thing,” he added, a smirk tugging at his lips. “If you quit being a novice, go out on a date with me.”

Now, that made you laugh. “A date?”

Jungkook nodded, anchoring his foot to one of the legs of your chair so he could drag it close to his and rest his arm on its top rail, the proximity such that you could feel his breathing against your cheek. Heart racing, you crossed your arms and tried your hardest to appear unbothered. “I’ll pick you up at five and we’ll go roller-skating until we can’t feel our legs, then we’ll have dinner in my van while we watch a drive-in movie– A scary one, so you cling onto me for safety. Then I’ll drive you home, walk you to your door, and you’ll go ‘Oh! It’s too late, why don’t you stay over?’. So we’ll have some drinks, and you’ll take my hand to lead me into your bedroom, and then…”

“And then we’ll say our prayers and go to sleep.”

“To sleep, yes,” Jungkook chuckled, “afterwards.”

“I don’t know what makes you think I wouldn’t live almost like a nun if I left here. I am, in fact, a Catholic.”

“A relaxed one, I dare say. Oh, come on. You’ve never thought about breaking your faith’s rules? Not even to have fun?” He raised his eyebrows, waiting for a confession, but you shook your head.

“I can have fun without breaking the rules, I always have.”

Jungkook nibbled at his lip for a while, mentally debating with himself. Whichever of the voices in his head won, it made him say, “What if I showed you my ways? Would you be up for that?”

“Up for what, exactly?”

“You’ll see.”

Due to the series of communal prayers scattered throughout the day called Liturgy of Hours, it was as early as five that the whole convent got up. You’d usually go straight back to bed after the first one and get what more rest you could until it was time for class or work, but today, despite it being Sunday, a few sisters had volunteered to go to the farm and help around, you and Jungkook joining them to nanny the goats.

You didn’t mind getting your habit dirty there, but it was being an awfully hot July, which was the reason why you were wearing lighter clothes that morning when walking into the chapel alongside Jungkook to attend Mass. He was an atheist whom you supposed only went to these things to spend more time with you, and that warmed your heart.

Ever since you’d started hanging out, the same less devout sisters who’d previously flocked around him had gone back to the handsome abbot’s orbit, so the nearer pews to the altar had quickly been taken. Together, you sat alone at the back, the pew all to yourselves. Three quite tall sisters were sat in the one in front of you and acted as a barrier Father Jimin hid behind of, but as long as you heard him, it didn’t matter.

Your mind went elsewhere no more than a couple of minutes into the service anyway. Tuning out seemed to be easy as of late.

It was just so unfair, all of it. You could be learning in university, meeting new people, living a normal life where you wouldn’t need to ask an abbot for permission to go out if you fancied taking a fucking walk! It didn’t have to mean you’d stop practising your religion or let yourself fall into sin at all, nothing had to change in that regard. You took a deep breath charged with frustration. If only your parents hadn’t decided to take the car in the middle of a storm and you’d had more time to make them see reason… Why did they have to die? Why did God have to take them and leave you alone?

Right in the middle of your brooding was when Jungkook put his hand on your bare knee and asked in a whisper, “Hey, are you okay?”

You forced a smile that he didn’t seem convinced by, so his hand remained on the same spot after he’d gone back to paying attention to Mass. His touch didn’t make you uncomfortable, you welcomed it and the comfort it provided, but your jaw did drop when it slowly travelled down your inner thigh, towards your intimate area.

“What are you doing?” you mouthed, petrified at the possibility of anyone noticing. Luckily, the only person facing the pews was Father Jimin, who couldn’t see a thing from the altar thanks to your barrier-sisters.

“Showing you my idea of fun,” Jungkook leaned in to whisper, lips brushing against your earlobe. It wasn’t that what made you gulp, though, but the fact that he reached your clit and rubbed it softly over your linen shorts, up and down, side to side… The unexpected pleasure made your breath hitch in your throat, gaze flying around the chapel at the speed of light. “No one’s watching,” Jungkook reassured you. “Live a little, Y/N.” Feeling his middle finger now press your clit firmly and at an increasing pace, you looked at him, shocked there was no sign of shame on his features, eyes half-lidded with arousal as they studied your worried ones. “Tell me to stop and I will.”

Stop? You were still registering something had started there, in a sacred place, during Mass! What you were letting Jungkook do to you was all kinds of sinful, but… it felt so good you couldn’t bring yourself to say anything. Sobering up, he ceased his actions at that lack of consent, and was going to withdraw his hand and apologise had you not grabbed it and kept it in place down there, much to the surprise of both.

Relief showed on Jungkook in the form of an exhale. He wasted no time, then, sliding his hand inside your shorts and underwear, making you bite down on your lip when he found your clit once more and rubbed it in circles. He lingered there just enough to make your core pulsate with ache when he abandoned it to move on to your wet slit, something you had to slouch for him to do. He eased two fingers inside you that he began pumping in and out with a mastery that got you squirming in your seat, hand glued to your mouth to hold back the moans that threatened to escape it and gaze locked on the tattooed sleeve that disappeared inside your shorts.

That was when everyone started singing a hymn. Jungkook took the chance to quicken his movements, the sounds of your irregular breathing and his fingers sliding into your juices eclipsed by the song. He licked his lips, coating them with saliva before leaving chaste kisses on your neck, knowing if his tongue met it he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from fucking you right there and then. When he pulled back, he noticed you’d closed your eyes to get lost in the pleasure, and that they opened only when you felt his breath near your parted lips, to stare down at his. So close, yet he restrained the urge to kiss you, intent on watching you come.

He didn’t have to wait long, your walls now clenching around his fingers every time he rubbed that magical spot, thighs shaking as a result. All the tension built up inside of you suddenly released, and you dissolved into a daze just in time for the ending of the hymn. Not to overstimulate you, Jungkook gently removed his fingers and slipped out of the chapel. He returned a minute later with his hand washed and dry, and although you readily intertwined fingers with his when he reached out, you dared not meet his eyes after what had just happened.

That night you lay awake tossing and turning forever, unable to forget the feel of his touch.

Inexplicably, you weren’t ashamed of all the sins you’d added to the collection that day: falling into the temptation of lust, doing pre-marital sexual acts that didn’t lead to procreation, breaching your vow of chastity, desecrating a holy place, taking the sacrament while in mortal sin… Somehow, you just weren’t. You were, right after, but now it was as though you’d managed to sweep all the guilt related to it under the rug. As for the one related to your parents, well, Jungkook had been the sweetest distraction from it.

A distraction you craved again.

You must have been held sway by a demon when you got up from bed to go find Jungkook, but you were in no hurry to free yourself from its grasp.

Except for the first night, he tended to be the sleepless one who wandered about the abbey until you eventually joined him, so you knew he’d be awake. Indeed, he was on the phone in the community room, getting tangled up in the cord as he paced around, nervous. He couldn’t see you lurking in the hallway’s shadows, so you decided to let curiosity get the better of you and eavesdrop the conversation he was having.

“No, you’re not following,” he whispered into the phone. “My cousin’s friend’s brother is into this hot religious girl, and I– he! sort of fingered her in public… In a church… No, there were people present, it was in the middle of Mass… Nobody, that I’m– that he’s aware… No, Hoseok, it’s not dope! He’s going up and down the walls like a fucking yoyo... He isn’t so sure it was a good idea, fears he might’ve crossed a line… Well, he hasn’t seen her since, I think she’s been avoiding him– Agh, he thinks!... Fuck yeah, she did, and he loved it too… The problem is that I don’t want her to regret it and feel bad about it just because it wasn’t the time or place, or to never want to have sex because I got her into it the wrong way… What? He, I said he… You’re right,” he sighed, putting an end to his pacing. “I’ll tell him. Thank you, bro... ‘Night.”

Arms crossed, you couldn’t help but smile fondly. He was that worried about it? You should’ve known, you were friends after all. That was all he probably wanted to be, at least. Friends. With benefits, but friends. Who would want to be more than that not only with a novice, but with one as troubled as you?

A noise made you look up. It was Jungkook, now by the window, flicking his lighter over and over to pass the time. Your eyes inspected his fingers under the moonlight, the same ones he’d buried inside you that morning, and the longing that had got you out of bed returned to move your feet in his direction. You must’ve been abrupt while approaching him, though, as he jolted with a gasp at the sight of you.

“Sorry.”

“Y/N…” he said as he caught his breath from the startle. He had hoped you’d show up, but not so suddenly. Payback, he thought, for the way we met. “Listen, about earlier–”

You cut his sentence short with a kiss. It was soft at first, as timid as you felt, but Jungkook soon got over the shock that had frozen him and took charge of the matter, pulling you in a tight embrace. His tongue entered your mouth and swirled around yours like it was always meant to, or at least that’s what you wanted to believe. How else could it feel so good, and Jungkook so addictive?

It was a challenge, but you found the strength to step back and whisper so lowly that he almost didn’t hear, “I want you.”

“Are you sure?” Jungkook cupped your face with both hands, forcing you to look into his eyes. No need for that, they already had you enthralled, dark with the desire you’d infected him with.

“Yes,” you exhaled, taking his hands in yours to lead him upstairs. “With you, yes.”

Once in your cell, you lost your pyjamas in a matter of seconds, both too impatient to feel each other.

Being naked and seeing Jungkook so was initially nerve-racking but once you were under the sheets, under his toned body, your bashfulness flew out the window. Especially when you saw his dick, already hard from just making out—you figured he’d been charged up since the morning. Yet his priority wasn’t his own pleasure, but yours, not an inch of your skin left untouched by his lips as he slowly travelled downwards. Until you started giggling out of nowhere, and Jungkook raised his head from in between your boobs to look at you in confusion.

“Your Barbie hair is tickling me,” you teased him as you tucked behind his ears the blond cascade that covered his face and grazed over your chest whenever he moved.

“Barbie, huh?” Jungkook whispered next to your ear only to lay a warm kiss right under it, all while he positioned himself in between your legs. “Do you want me to tickle you somewhere else?”

“Actually, I…” How did one say such a thing? “I want to tickle you, but I don’t know what to do.”

He chuckled, “My pleasure to instruct you.”

You did as he said and reclined next to him, upside down so he could touch you—he’d insisted—while you sucked him off. It did feel strange to take him in your mouth and run your tongue along the length of his shaft, at least until you heard his breathing speed up, resisting to buck his hips into your face as he was. Your cunt throbbed, and you wished Jungkook’s cock was inside it instead of your mouth. He seemed to sense that, so his hand soon crept between your thighs to remedy your ails, a whine escaping you then.

“You’re just as tight as earlier, fuck,” he groaned from the pillow as his fingers struggled to curl and uncurl inside of you, given you couldn’t keep still. It made you all the more eager to pleasure him, taking him as deep as you could so he saw the same stars you were beginning to see yourself. “You’re doing so well… That’s it, suck it harder, darling, ah… Wait, stop, stop!”

Immediately, you backed off. “Did I do something wrong?”

Jungkook sat up and used his thumb to wipe the drooling trail of saliva on your chin. “You were doing too well, miss.” Ogling your body, he licked his thumb. “Why don’t you come over here?” You nodded, would’ve agreed to do anything he asked in that moment.

He lay down again while holding your hands to guide you over to his lap, over his erection, but your sudden nerves made you shy away. Nevertheless, Jungkook pulled you closer with a smirk. “Where are you running off to?”

“I’m sorry, just… Will it hurt?”

He sat up to peck your lips cutely, “Oh, it will be excruciatingly painful,” and you pushed his chest with an eye-roll, so he returned to his previous position. He grabbed the condom he’d stopped by his cell to get before following you to yours and put it on.

A deep breath later, you grabbed his cock and placed its tip in your wet entrance, looking down at it to make sure you were doing it right. Hands between his head and the pillow, Jungkook watched patiently, turned on by your inexperience and the fact that he and he alone got to be the one to pop your cherry, make you break your vow of chastity. He thought it’d take you a while to get used to the size of his dick, but you surprised him by rolling your hips almost aggressively the second you sat on it, chasing pleasure as though it would escape from your grasp otherwise.

“Shit, yes, like that.” All flushed under you and with his eyes barely open, feeling the way you moved with all his senses, Jungkook ignited a lust in you that even an angel would be willing to fall from grace for.

“Oh my God, it feels so good…”

“I know, baby.” He wanted to dig his nails into your hips and move them back and forth himself but found that for a virgin, you were already doing a superb job, laughed instead. “Look at you, fuck. What a dirty bitch, you’re loving it.”

“I am…” you panted, his name-calling sending you over the edge. “Jesus, I am.”

It wasn’t long until Jungkook felt your walls clench tight around him, something he didn’t blame you for as he himself was close too. His cock had been burning in his pants ever since Mass, even after he’d jerked himself off in his cell when the service had finished and you’d vanished. Grabbing your wrist, he pulled you close to his mouth and kissed you hungrily, but even then, you refused to stop moving, felt too good. “Gonna come already? You like me that bad?”

I like you a lot. You were having a tough time not moaning, especially when he talked. His deep voice did all manner of things to you. “I’m so close, ah...”

“Why don’t I help you out with that, hm?”

He didn’t wait for an answer before bending his knees and repeatedly thrusting into you with such force that it had you gasping for air. If you’d known he could fuck you like that, you’d have asked him to be on top at the beginning. Eyes squeezed shut, you buried your head in the crook of his neck to moan against it as you came, finally letting go. Jungkook bit into your shoulder, not to hurt you, just hard enough to keep himself from grunting loudly as he found his own release after a few more thrusts, but your bodies remained locked until your heartbeats slowed down.

It didn’t hit you how loud your panting had been until your breath toned down and there was silence in the room. You prayed it hadn’t woken anybody up.

At some point, you got off Jungkook for him to remove his condom and go throw it in the bin next to your desk. You covered your naked body with the sheets, expecting to next see him get dressed, but he lay back on the bed. You didn’t understand.

“Aren’t you leaving?”

He scoffed. “Kicking me out, ouch. Why would I leave?”

“I thought… that’s what guys do.” At least, that was what your non-virgin sisters had told you. That men lost interest in a woman as soon as they’d had their way with her.

Jungkook shook his head as he said softly, “I’m not going anywhere.” Having sex surely messed with one’s head, there was no other explanation as to why you blushed like a teenager. The two of you got on your side, facing each other, and Jungkook started caressing your arm with the back of his fingers, the simple action so soothing you thought you’d fall asleep. “Is this nice?”

“Very,” you replied, eyes closing against your will.

“Did I go too far earlier?”

You were taken aback by the sudden question. “Maybe, but I liked it. You were right about breaking the rules. Looking back… I think it was what you said about living a little that got to me. Here at the convent, I don’t really feel alive, but I do when we’re this close.”

“See?” Jungkook asked gently, trying to make you see his point. “What’s stopping you from quitting, then? Nothing should cost you feeling alive.”

“Apart from my parents?” you sighed. “Look around. As a novice, I couldn’t receive their inheritance. Vow of poverty, remember? What you see in this cell is everything I own.” Jungkook had already noticed on his way in your lack of personal belongings. A cross hung over the bed, a small pile of religious books on the desk, a framed photo of you with your family, and little more. It was so empty and cold that anyone would’ve thought you’d just moved in. “I can’t afford to go to university, much less live on my own.”

“Well… I’ve been saving up for a while and I’m moving in an apartment with Hoseok and Tae when summer’s over. Why don’t you come stay with us? I’m sure they won’t mind!” he said enthusiastically, eyes sparkling like he’d come up with the solution to all your problems. “I’ll help you find a job and you’ll be able to afford uni, easy-peasy.”

You were too sleepy to chuckle, but a faint smile did tug at your lips because of how determined he was to fix things. Things that were too broken to be fixed. “Let’s not talk about this right now, please?”

Even though Jungkook wasn’t pleased with your response, he forced a smile. “Why, did I tire you out?” Leaning in, he kissed your lips lightly. “You’re right, let’s not ruin the moment. Come here.”

He had you rest your head on his chest, and held lovingly, you fell asleep.

Understandably, he’d left by the time you woke up. If anyone saw him coming out of your cell, they might work out what he’d been up to there and the two of you would be kicked out of the convent. His scent lingered in your sheets, but it didn’t make any less disappointing waking up without him by your side. What’s more, as you put on your habit after having a quick shower, you were assailed by the most heart-breaking questions.

What if Jungkook had pretended to be your friend only to get in your pants? What if, now he’d got what he wanted, he blew you off? What if you’d risked everything for a guy who felt nothing for you?

To your immense relief, when you walked into the refectory for breakfast, he waved at you with a smile and gestured you to sit next to him. You were going to before Father Jimin suddenly appeared before you.

“Good morning, Y/N,” he greeted warmly, as ever.

“Oh, good morning, Father!”

“I wanted to make sure everything’s okay.”

You blinked. “It is, why?”

Shit. He knows?

“You left the chapel in a hurry after Mass yesterday,” he said, “and you didn’t show up to the remaining services. Were you unwell?”

“Oh... Yes, I was.” If you had locked yourself up in your cell, it was for no other reason than to avoid Jungkook and digest the fact that he’d fingered you in public. You lied, “I was sick all day, but I’m fine now.”

“I’m glad,” Jimin said with a smile you returned, then grabbed your hand to surround it with both of his, like old people will. “I know this comes out of nowhere, but I’m really proud of you, Y/N. For pulling through these challenging times. Many, including myself, can only learn from your strength. I know you’ll make a great nun.”

He gave your hand a soft squeeze and left you there, frozen in your spot. It was as though your sins finally dawned on you, all of them at once. You’d really believed leaving the convent didn’t have to mean you’d betray your faith and here you were, sleeping with a guy you’d met barely a month ago without shame because that made you feel alive.

What had you done? What were you turning into?

No longer hungry, you left to go back to your cell, tears already streaming down your cheeks before you made it out of the empty hallways. Or were they empty?

“Y/N!” You ignored Jungkook’s voice and quickened your pace, too ashamed to face him. “Hey, wait up!” He sprinted to reach you, concern shaping his features when he blocked your way and realised you were crying and trying to hide it from him. One thing was telling him your troubles, another to break down like a pathetic, helpless little girl. In the most caring tone, he asked, “Hey, what’s wrong?”

You explained, told him how you felt.

“I’m letting Father Jimin down,” you sobbed. “Him, my parents, God, and everyone.”

“You’re not,” Jungkook kept repeating. “You’re in a period of discernment, right? So who says you can’t reach a conclusion by trial and error? That’s what other nuns have done too. Before they got here, yes, but it was doing things they later regretted that convinced them to become nuns.”

“I don’t regret last night,” you said in all honesty, “but I do hate that I don’t regret sinning... You just can’t understand, you’re not religious.”

Jungkook looked down. “Maybe I can’t, but if I know something it’s that if what we did made you happy, it shouldn’t be a sin.” He looked around to make sure no one else was there before cupping your wet cheeks and kissing you, every muscle in your body relaxing under his touch as he knew they would. “Now come with me and eat something.”

He didn’t fully convince you, but your will wasn’t strong enough to resist his tempting.

For the next three weeks, you continued sleeping together at night, pretending you were no more than close friends at day. Whatever the time, Jungkook made sure to spend as much of it as possible with you, although not for a moment did you ever let yourself believe he had any feelings for you other than sexual. You weren’t even sure you wanted him to develop them, truth be told, as this thing you had was a fling. Come the end of summer less than a month from now, he’d move out and you’d start the second and final year of your novitiate, so whatever it was between you had no future.

Still, he kept writing you songs.

Some he’d sing quietly in bed so you’d fall asleep listening to his angelic voice, but the latest one, Church, he’d also asked you to come see him perform in a concert. And so, you’d lied to Father Jimin again, claiming the ancient kettle in the kitchen was broken and a new one needed to be bought. What’s a sin more to secure your one-way ticket to Hell?

Jungkook had warned you this song was not PG-13. He’d be the one singing it, not Amber, and he’d begged and begged you to wear one of his huge t-shirts to the concert with nothing underneath, refusing to tell you why. Leaving the abbey dressed as modestly as was expected of a novice, you changed outfits in the venue’s toilets. You didn’t know why you’d agreed to it but the first line of Church explained his request.

You're wearing nothing but my t-shirt Call me shallow but I'm only getting deeper, yeah Stay on the ground until your knees hurt No more praying, baby, I'ma be your preacher

He half whispered the whole verse into the microphone, all while his eyes pierced yours from the stage. You couldn’t look away either, entranced by his voice and presence. So far from where you were sat, how could he make you feel as though the air had run out in the whole venue?

And I'll keep leading you on If you keep leading me into your room The drinks are all gone But that's fine, baby, so am I

You remembered the date Jungkook had talked about taking you out on and how… standard it now sounded to you as he turned his attention to the girls who cheered for him in the audience. Was it scripted? Something he said to all of them to lead them on? The more you thought about it, the more you realised he’d never actually take you skating. No, you were just for keeping his nights busy.

His gaze found you again.

I'm about to take you back to church (back to church) Well, tell me your confessions, baby, what's the worst? Yeah Baptise in your thighs 'til it hurts (you know it hurts) 'Cause I'm about to take you back to church (oh yeah)

I'll keep you up until the sunset Speaking in tongues, yeah, we ain't done yet (yeah) Don't take my verses out of context I know it's weighing on your conscience

Those last two lines… Further confirmation your relationship was just sex and that you shouldn’t read too much into anything he said, or feel guilty for sinning by having a friend-with-benefits. It was self-contradictory of you to feel down about him not reciprocating your feelings, but you did. Don’t they say love is irrational?

Despite how sad you’d got, the night didn’t end with the concert, but with Jungkook fucking you without restrain. When he was inside you, nothing else mattered.

You were in the back of his van, parked somewhere near the abbey yet not enough for anyone to hear the loud moans that each of his thrusts caused, even with the windows open not to melt in there.

“Fuck, keep moaning for me,” he grunted, gripping your waist to keep you in place.

“Keep fucking me, then…” Jungkook scoffed, would’ve commented on how dirty he’d turned you had he not been so close. You’d come already yourself, but were more than glad to let him go on until he did too.

“Since you’ve got such a big mouth,” he said, panting, “why don’t you put it to good use?”

It took him most of his willpower to pull out and remove his condom. You sat up and opened your mouth for him to shove his hard cock in, swirling your tongue around the tip before closing your lips tight around it and starting to bob your head to take all of him. A bit more experienced now and having learned to love sucking Jungkook, you knew exactly how he liked it done. You could feel it, his cock twitching against your tongue as you savoured it, letting you know he was going to come.

He pulled back again to jerk himself, and you began rubbing your clit, aroused again by the sight between your spread legs. “I thought you were done?”

“Yes, but you’re so hot…” you moaned, and he huffed out a laugh. Biting his lip harshly as he ogled your naked body and the way you touched yourself, it wasn’t long until he came all over your thighs, your own release following.

Jungkook smirked when he was no longer out of breath. “Dreams do come true.” He was staring at your thighs dripping with his cum and your own juices, and you realised he was talking about Church’s ‘baptise in your thighs’. You were about to smile when the rest of the song came to mind, and suddenly you didn’t feel like it anymore… Once Jungkook had cleaned you up with a cloth, he lay down next to you. “Come here.”

You always hoped he’d say that, even though he never failed to. So resting your back on his chest, he held you from behind, caressing your hands in a comfortable silence. It was then that you noticed the blank spot between the tattoos in Jungkook’s wrist. It was tiny, but seemed intentional.

“Are you not inking this bit?”

“I’m saving it for a small symbol, maybe a letter.” He kissed your temple. “Your name’s initial, what do you say?”

Your lips committed to it before your brain did. “Do you get tattoos of the others?”

Jungkook frowned. You couldn’t see him, but you knew he did. “What others?”

“The other girls you sleep with.” There was no jealousy in your casual tone, but it was still petty. Jungkook shifted so he could face you. He was indeed frowning, both perplexed and offended.

“There are no others,” he promised, serious as you’d ever seen him. “You trust me that little?”

“I didn’t think I had to trust you. Aren’t we just hooking up?”

Jungkook rubbed his eyes as if the confusion was giving him a headache. “You thought I was sleeping with other girls and said nothing?”

By what right could you ask him to be faithful in a relationship you planned to end soon? Besides, what if in doing so, you annoyed him enough to stop wanting to be friends? If sharing him with others was the only way to have him, it hurt, but you’d do it. You looked down as you whispered, kind of embarrassed, “I guess I do like you that much…”

Jungkook raised your chin with his curled index finger, made you look at him. He despised the sadness he saw in the depths of your eyes, the one you were trying to repress. “You’re much more than sex to me. I worship you and if I could, I’d spend every waking moment next to you.”

In a small pause, you tried to rack your brain. “Is that from a song?”

“No, but it should be. I’ll write it down later.” Jungkook nodded, agreeing the rhyme had potential. Still, he wasn’t going to let you change the subject. “Y/N, I’m in love with you.”

He is? That did take you off guard.

“You shouldn’t be, I’m a novice,” you said anyway at your most hypocritical.

Jungkook sighed, “What’s so wrong about it? Don’t you love me?”

You didn’t want to lie to him. A smile made your lips stretch before you answered, “I do,” and softly, Jungkook kissed them. Every time he pulled back from a kiss, it felt like it had been too short, no matter how long it lasted. Like you needed more because you could never be sated of him. “Does this mean… we’re dating?”

“I mean, you’re technically engaged to Jesus, and I’m not a guy who likes sharing,” Jungkook joked before giving you a peck and returning to his previous position under you. “If you don’t wanna be just lovers, you’ll have to break up with him first.”

You answered nothing. Should you listen to him, though?

Around two weeks of bliss sprang from your love confessions, where it became hard to pretend you weren’t mad for each other in public, such as when he’d whisper in your ear how provocative you looked in your habit and you giggled like a schoolgirl in love—which, technically, you were. Your parents barely made it into your thoughts, as they were filled to the brim with Jungkook.

From the moment they were over, it all went downhill. Worse, it fell into an abyss.

You had just come out of class with other novices when your hand was grabbed by someone who dragged you through the hallway to head upstairs. “Sorry to steal her, sisters, it’s urgent!”

“Jungkook, what are you doing?” you asked as he led you into your cell in a rush, closing the door for privacy. “You can’t be in here during the day–”

“I’ve found a way.” Only then did you notice how excited he was, a grin across his face. “A way to pay for your university.”

His aunt had been the one to tell him, at the beginning of the summer, that he must plan ahead as an adult now that his parents had turned their back on him, but it wasn’t until he fell for you that he actually started doing that. He was sure he wanted you to be by his side on whatever path he took, for his future to merge with yours somehow.

You, however, knew this conversation would not end well. “Enlighten me.”

“Bangtan is going on a nationwide tour next year.”

“Oh my God, that’s great!” You held his hands and grinned with him. “I’m so happy for you.”

“Y/N, this means I’ll earn a lot of money.” Then, you looked away. “With what I’ve got saved up plus that, you can afford to go to uni, even a private one, and we don’t have to live with the boys, we can have a place of our own! On the road we won’t even have to sweat about that, our company will pay for everyth–”

You freed your hands from his grasp, said with a nervous laugh, “You’re going a bit fast, Jungkook…”

His grin faded. “What do you mean? Isn’t money what you need to get out of here?”

“I’m grateful you want to take care of me but I can’t leave, you know why.”

“Are you serious right now?” Jungkook couldn’t believe it. “Y/N, your parents are gone. I know it’s hard but you have to move on, I don’t want you to wither in this place when you have a chance at happiness.”

“Just because you chose to let your parents down doesn’t mean the rest of us want to.” You regretted those words as soon as they left your mouth, the sound of Jungkook’s heart breaking reaching your ears. Or was it your own?

It took him some long seconds to process you’d said that, then answer, “I told you how they were to me, forgive me for not giving a shit about them.”

“Well, mine are a different story. I do care about them.”

“And not about us? We can’t be together anymore after I leave the convent. Have you not thought about that, or were you going to end things like they meant nothing? Because for weeks, I’ve been trying to find a way to have a future with you.”

“I never asked you to,” you sighed, welling up. You might not have, but a part of you had wanted to. Wanted to go with him too. “There’s no way we can have a future together.”

Jungkook teared up as well, and you hated yourself for it. He was being met with unjust meanness from the person he genuinely loved. You sucked so bad.

“What am I to you, then? What have I been these past months?”

“A distraction.”

It wasn’t a lie, and that’s what hurt the most. You loved Jungkook, and yet, you’d used him to set aside the pain of your parents’ loss and the guilt that was consuming you for being a sinner. You were always going to dispose of him like a toy outgrown, regardless of everything he’d done for you.

He stared for a while, but you couldn’t meet his eyes out of shame. “That’s good to know,” he muttered before storming out, leaving you in a puddle of tears you deserved to be drowned in.

You trudged your way to class after a grey morning in the library. There was still no passage from any religious book that excused your countless sins and promised the salvation of your blighted soul, but that didn’t worry you so much right now. What did, was Jungkook.

He was likely avoiding you—for which you couldn’t blame him—though you doubted meeting and apologising for the ugly things you’d said would be a remedy to the damage done. Not that you didn’t mean them, but they could’ve been said with tact. Jungkook’s wicked crime was loving you, after all.

So busy were you missing something as random as his cologne that you didn’t notice until the end of the class that everyone kept stealing glances at you, whispering to each other afterwards. Even if a tired demeanour wasn’t deserving of such a disproportionate reaction, you still blamed the barely two hours of sleep you’d got for your sisters’ scandalised looks, but another novice approached you in the hallway out of pity to let you know you’d actually made the convent’s news.

You froze in your spot when she said it was because Jungkook had spread the rumour that you’d been sleeping with him.

No, please... Tell me he hasn’t.

Leaving your sister where she stood and running off to find him with the disapproving gaze of every other person you passed burning into your skin, you prayed you were inside a nightmare harder with each stride.

Jungkook couldn’t have betrayed you. Someone must have seen or heard you and put two and two together, right?

Such theory turned into dust when you saw him sat in the cloister surrounded by girls like the day you’d met, playing a melody in the guitar for their attentive ears. Somehow, you knew he’d done it then, and on purpose. You started to feel sick as you approached them, whether because of the summer heat or the knife stabbed and twisted in your back, you didn’t know.

“We need to talk.”

Jungkook didn’t bother to look up as he said, “If we were still dating, I’d totally be shaking at that sentence, Y/N.”

Some of your sisters giggled, others bit their lip not to. You went red, begged, “Please.”

Albeit reluctantly, he stood up and followed you to an empty hallway. You didn’t know whether you were more upset, scared, surprised, or disappointed, but the smell of the cologne you were missing earlier managed to calm you down a little, as Jungkook’s company tended to do. Your stupid body seemed to not have caught up on the fact that he was the cause of your hurting.

“What do you want?” he asked curtly.

“What do I want? To know how you could tell everyone about us, Jungkook, how you could do this to me. I’ll be expelled! And I don’t have parents or a family that will take me back if I go apologise to them, I have nowhere to go. Is that what you want? For me to be with you because I have no other choice?”

“Of course not, we’re done,” Jungkook assured you that wasn’t his plan, which you believed. He hated your guts, his dark eyes told you. “But now you’re not tied to a place you don’t really want to be in.”

“Oh, don’t pretend you didn’t do this out of revenge.”

“So what if I did?”

You stared at him for a while, speechless like he had the time you’d last met. “And here I thought you’d proved me wrong.”

“In what,” Jungkook asked in a scoff, “becoming a nun now that you’ve been dicked down?”

The coldness of his tone stung your heart. In disbelief, you shook your head. “No, in that there was more to you than what first meets the eye.”

A grain of shock broke through the mask of indifference Jungkook was wearing, probably because your words weren’t visibly said against your better judgement this time, but while seeing him through the same lenses as his parents did. You looked at him just like them the night they’d kicked him out, in a way he had hoped you never would.

And how could you not? You’d thought you knew him, yet he’d gone ahead and ruined your life. Maybe you never did know the real Jungkook at all, who was now too taken aback to come up with an answer before another novice approached.

“Father Jimin wants to see you, sister,” she said, after which you took a deep breath, nodded, and followed her without so much as giving Jungkook one last glance.

In his office, sat on his desk, Father Jimin was quiet. Had been so since you’d come in and sat down.

One of his elbows rested on his chair’s arm and two fingers pressed on his closed lips as he thought of what to say. You already had an idea of what it would be, and it made you no more ready, fists clutching the skirt of your lap.

“I don’t know what to say,” he finally confessed in a sigh. It struck you how it was the first time in the few years you’d known Father Jimin that you didn’t see a smile on his face, or at least friendliness. He was the kind of person who always saw the best in people but right now, there was nothing good left in you. “I’m truly at a loss for words. I never thought you’d do something like this, or that I’d find out from other mouths.”

Tears blurred your sight at the memory of him telling you he was proud of you. “I know I have no right to ask for forgiveness, but I’m begging you, Father. It was the mistake of my life–”

“You broke your vows, Y/N. Defiled a holy place.” Oh… Jungkook had admitted to that as well? Chin trembling, you pressed your lips together not to cry. “Lied to me about it and God knows what else… This behaviour cannot be tolerated. You can stay in the abbey until you find a job and a place to live, but you are dismissed from this community, if not excommunicated.”

You sobbed, unable to hold it in anymore, “Father, please. I can’t let my parents down, their last wish was that I become a nun–”

“Isn’t it your wish? Were you lying about that too?” Your head lowered in shame and Father Jimin leaned back into his chair with a loud sigh. “You should have thought about your parents before getting involved with Jungkook. Be grateful they aren’t here to see you stray this bad.” He waited for you to say something, but shame kept you from it, as he was right. “You may leave now.”

Everything had happened so fast that a week later, you were still assimilating it.

Except when necessary, you barely left your cell. Dreaded both the judgemental looks of your sisters and the non-existent ones from Father Jimin, who ignored your presence whenever he had to suffer it in the chapel or the refectory. Not to mention running into Jungkook. To your knowledge, he’d been kicked out too, was sometimes seen moving boxes from his cell to his van. There wasn’t much for him to pack, so you guessed he was dragging the process. What for, you tried not to care.

That was the main reason why, helped by the yellow pages, you’d been job-hunting through the telephone. Not that it was better or worse than going in person, because nobody wanted to employ an ex-novice anyway. They literally hung up when you mentioned you’d been expelled from the convent—as expected, to be honest—but lying again was not an option. You’d learned your lesson the hard way.

Eventually, you did manage to land an interview for a job. Given it didn’t pay that well, it’d be a while until you could afford to move out of the abbey and even longer until you’d step in a university as a student, which was frustrating, but at least you didn’t need anyone’s permission to leave. Since you weren’t a novice anymore, nobody batted an eyelid at you heading outside the afternoon of your scheduled interview.

You were near the main door when, out of nowhere, Sister Daeun stopped you to talk.

“My nephew’s told me everything. I can’t say I approve of your relationship, but it does make me feel better that there was love involved. A lot, apparently,” your gaze averted to the ground, “which makes your decision to break up with him out of respect for your parents all the more admirable. It was wrong of Jungkook to make it public, he knows that, and he would like to apologise and give you the money he made this summer.”

“I couldn’t take it, sister,” you opposed. “It’s his. He needs it to pay rent, he’s moving in with Hoseok and Taehyung.”

Wait, was that why he hadn’t left yet? Because he wanted to wait until September so he didn’t have to pay for August?

“He’ll make much more when he’s on tour,” Sister Daeun insisted. “This is the least he can do for you. That I can do for you, too. You’ll always be my novice, Y/N, no matter what.” Without a second’s thought, you hugged her tightly. It was solacing to know there was at least one person who saw past your sins. “Jungkook’s gone to get the money but he won’t be here until late, Bangtan is opening for another one of those rock bands in a concert tonight. He’ll give it to you tomorrow.”

“I was just going into town, so if you tell me the name of the venue, I’ll stop by. He must be there doing a stage rehearsal.” You remembered the light in his eyes when he’d explained to you everything about the vocation he was so passionate about, how sweet his smile was… No. No. You shouldn’t feel anything after what he’d done. “I want to get this over and done with as soon as possible.”

That turned out to be yet another bad decision.

Once your interview was over, you rushed to the same venue you’d seen Jungkook perform Rock God and Church.

Paying no mind to the fans at the entrance who looked askance at you for jumping the line, the security guy let you in when he recognised you. Memories of the two nights you’d previously been there stormed you while getting backstage, especially how fast your heart had beat because of the racy lyrics of the songs and the way Jungkook had looked at you from the stage.

Now, it died inside your chest as you watched him make out with Amber at the end of the otherwise empty hallway.

He had her pinned against the wall, hands gripping her ass to press their bodies together and lips devouring hers as though he couldn’t get enough. Amber’s hands were wrapped around his neck, and she now grabbed a fistful of his hair to pull his head back and start kissing his neck. You saw how Jungkook smirked at the action, turned on by her dominance.

Both in their rockstar outfits, they looked like a perfect match, so you couldn’t help but wonder if they’d been dating all along. If that boyfriend of hers Jungkook had told you about was none other than himself.

Forcing yourself out of your shock, you exited the venue through the back as quickly as you could, saving the cascade of tears that was already building up in your eyes until you were alone.

It wasn’t that you were going to forgive him and expected his apology to come with an offer to date him again, but even after everything he had done to you, you still loved him. You hated yourself for it, but you couldn't help it. You were so stupid that you wished he'd find you there, sat on the cold concrete, and just held you in his arms until you stopped crying.

The next day you slept through breakfast, and would’ve stayed in your cell until lunch had Father Jimin not summoned you to his office again.

Curiously, this time around he looked… sorry?

“I’ve been made aware of some information this morning,” he said from across his desk with a nod.

“About me?” You shifted uncomfortably in your seat. Oh, God, what now?

“I can’t answer that because it has to do with a confession, but it’s made me realise I was wrong.” He leaned in, gaze moving around as he tried to think of a way not to reveal anything disclosed in the confessional box. “I should’ve been more cautious instead of welcoming just anyone into our home. Sometimes, I fail to see beyond the surface, and it results in the harm of others. A harm I pray it’s possible to heal from.”

“I don’t understand…”

“What I mean is that you don’t have to be afraid anymore. You can go back to being a novice, or take as long as you need to resolve any doubts you might have. Whatever you choose, I’ll support you.”

“But, why, Father? The things I did– You forgive me?”

“I’ve seen you regret them even if they weren’t your fault, so yes, I do.” You frowned. “I just hope you can forgive me too.”

On your way back to your cell, you walked slowly, using all your energy to figure out what Father Jimin had been talking about. When the answer popped up in your mind, you turned around and ran through the abbey. If Jungkook had done what you thought he had… Fortunately, it didn’t take long to find him, as you almost crashed together when turning to the next hallway. Had it not been because he’d grabbed your waist in time, you would’ve fallen.

When he realised it was you, he let go and stepped back. “Y/N, I wanted to talk to y–”

“Did you tell Father Jimin you raped me?”

The question took him by surprise. “He talked to you first… Wait, I thought confessional secrecy was unbreakable?”

“He didn’t tell me, I deduced it on my own.” You crossed your arms, disappointed you were right. “Why would you do that? I can’t make sense of it.”

“It was the only way to get the abbot to take you back. It’s not like he can report me to the police, and I’m leaving anyway… I told him I made you do things and that you were scared to tell anyone.” Jungkook looked everywhere but your eyes. “I’m really sorry for outing you. It was fucking childish of me and you didn’t deserve it. I was just so mad at what you said… but I know that’s no excuse.”

A part of you wanted to apologise for that and even ask him if it was too late to start over, but another reminded you of what you saw last night and stopped you, along with the one that should hold the most weight—your parents. It was a miracle you’d been given back the chance to honour their wishes, so you couldn’t ruin it again.

“I also wanted to give you this.” Jungkook handed you an old school bag. “My aunt told you what’s inside, right? She mentioned earlier you were going to come pick it up yesterday at the venue.”

“Yes, I forgot…” you lied. “I was at a job interview and got out quite late.”

“That’s okay. Did it go well?” He shouldn’t have asked, it was none of his business anymore. The interest in you had just rolled out of his mouth before he could stop it.

“It did, actually.” Both of you knew that if you went back to being a novice, you couldn’t take the job, but neither addressed it.

“Swell.” Jungkook put his hands inside his pockets, looked at you like he wanted to say much more. “I hope you have a happy life, Y/N. I really do.”

“Wait, are you saying goodbye? You’re leaving now?”

So soon?

“Yeah, poor Father Jimin thinks I’m… Well, you know. I wouldn’t want someone like me around you girls either. Plus, it’s September today, summer’s over,” he said with a forced smile. “Hoseok and Tae are waiting for me in the van. I shouldn’t keep them waiting.”

Before he could leave, you walked closer and gave him a hug. It didn’t feel right even when he wrapped his arms tight around you and buried his face in the crook of your neck, what with everything left unsaid, but you needed to feel his warmth one last time.

“Goodbye, Jungkook. And happy birthday.”

Two years later

“You’ll like Bangtan, they’re wicked hot,” Chloe said for the third time, rather trying to convince herself than you, as she knew rock wasn’t your type of music. “Especially Taehyung, he’s my favourite!”

The concert was supposed to start soon, so hugging yourself and rubbing your arms, you stood on your tiptoes to check if the long queue ahead was moving any faster. “Well, I’m glad they’re hot, ‘cause I’m freezing.”

She, Chloe, was a friend you’d made on the first day of university. Lots had changed.

“It won’t be long now, get the tickets ready,” she gave you something to do, to forget about the February cold.

As she’d promised, it took less than five minutes for the two of you to enter the biggest venue in town. Such was the fame of Bangtan now. You were only glad the security guy from the other times wasn’t there to recognise you, since Chloe was unaware of your past as a groupie. It wasn’t that you were keeping it from her… You just didn’t feel like talking about him.

“Come on,” she grinned while grabbing your hand, all excited, “let’s get close to the stage!”

The concert lasted what felt like an eternity.

Not only did you have to endure Rock God and Church again, which opened the wound of a relationship you still hadn’t healed from, but you also had to keep your head down so as to not be spotted by the band members.

It was going alright, though, until you made the mistake of glancing up, and saw him. And he saw you.

Minus the fact that he wasn’t a blond anymore, Jungkook looked the same as always. Not that that was a bad thing. Whether in his rockstar outfit or covered in goat milk, he took your breath away. He skipped a few notes due to the shock of seeing you in the crowd but as the professional he was, he managed to make his faltering almost unnoticeable and keep playing the guitar like nothing had happened. But he wouldn’t lose you out of sight.

You wanted to look away, leave, even, but found you couldn’t, like Jungkook had put a spell on you. A spell that only broke once Bangtan thanked their fans for coming and left the stage.

Chloe, who’d been cheering throughout the whole show, now went on about how amazing it had been, how hot Taehyung had looked. Not really listening, you automatically nodded to everything until you heard, “Let’s go to the toilets before a line forms, I really need to pee.”

“Sure.”

You held her purse while you waited outside, recalling how Father Jimin had warned you seeing Jungkook again would only make your wound sting—to which you’d agreed! The only reason you were there was because you’d promised Chloe. Chloe, who was taking so long.

With a sigh, your eyes neglected that random spot on the floor they’d been fixed on and flew around to end up on those of Jungkook, who was walking towards you. The few people in the line to use the toilets gasped and watched their idol, but he didn’t care, walked past them like they didn’t exist. You, weren’t sure what to feel when he was finally in front of you.

“Hi,” he said with a faint smile that you returned rather awkwardly, given the fact everyone was looking at you. “Can we talk… in private?”

Every cell of your body told you to decline, that Jungkook was a book you shouldn’t pick up again even to leaf through, but your head nodded on its own accord. Hope you don’t mind, Chloe.

It was upstairs to the now deserted first floor he led you, and the balcony of which you stood next by, where you could see the few people left heading out. They didn’t hold your attention for longer than a second, though.

“I didn’t think you’d come,” Jungkook spoke almost shyly, yet his eyes didn’t leave your face until he forced them to, not to weird you out. How long had he been staring like that? But you looked so pretty...

“I’m here with a friend from uni, she’s a fan.”

He didn’t understand. “Wait, you ended up leaving the convent?”

“I did finish my novitiate but I never took the vows. They let me live there, though.”

It wasn’t a decision you made overnight, obviously, and one Father Jimin and Sister Daeun worked hard for many months to make you see it wouldn’t have upset your parents as much as you believed, much less get them to stop loving you. In fact, you were still coming to terms with it, not entirely free of guilt, but a mix of secular and spiritual life was proving to be exactly what you needed.

The university and the abbey, parties and Mass, your new friends and your family… You could have both and save your soul from damnation. Now, could you save your heart from breaking all over again? It felt like it already was, physically so close to Jungkook yet so far that an uncomfortable silence had fallen between you.

“Are you seeing anyone?”

You looked at him. Cut to the chase, alright… “I’m not. A-Are you?”

Was that a sigh of relief he let out through his parted lips, or did you just want it to be? “No.”

“I thought you’d be dating Amber.” Jungkook frowned slightly, so you went on and confessed, “I saw you together the night before you left. I came to pick up the money and… Well, none of that matters now.”

Horror painted Jungkook’s face. That was how you’d remembered him? Getting off with Amber?

“She’d just broken up with her boyfriend,” he wasted no time in saying. “Neither of us was thinking clearly. It was a one-time thing, an adrenaline rush after a concert.”

You hugged yourself, lips pressing together at the details you didn’t want to hear. “You don’t need to explain, we weren’t dating anymore…”

“Fuck, I’m sorry that you’ve thought all this time that I was with her,” Jungkook apologised anyway, gaze falling to the floor in shame. “Actually, I know that it doesn’t count for anything, but I’m sorry about a lot of things.”

“Yeah, I wish it did. Count… Or better yet, I wish I’d gone with you,” you laughed, at the fact that you meant it.

“What?” Jungkook took a step closer, as though he’d misheard and wanted to make sure he got it this time. Suddenly, you realised what an idiot you were being.

“Nothing, forget it.” You turned around to leave before the lump in your throat summoned any tears, but Jungkook took your hand to stop you. He couldn’t let you go, even if he’d been the one to leave last time.

“I’m glad you didn’t come with me, Y/N, and that you got to do what you wanted. But I do wish I hadn’t ruined everything and hurt you. If I could go back, I'd punch me in the face.”

It didn’t mean you’d forgotten, but the truth was that you’d forgiven what he did a while ago. After all, “I was also a dick to you.”

“If you’re a dick, then I like dick.”

Actually, you hated him.

You hated even more that that made you laugh but it was because of Jungkook’s clownery that you first fell for him. And you’d never stopped loving him. He smiled fondly, caressing your hand. On his wrist, where there used to be a small uninked spot, now was your name’s initial. Neither had he, it seemed.

“Does this mean you want us to…?”

His eyes opened wide, feigning scandal. “What, here? I’d sooner do it in a chapel.” You rolled your eyes, but couldn’t keep from smiling. “How about we start with a date? Say... Friday at 5pm? I know a good roller-skating rink.”