Pink Lemonade ✓

xxv

      Junior year was complicated for him. He didn't know where he stood. Technically he was in the popular crowd, but not for the same reasons as others. Taehyung was popular for being handsome, charming, rich and talented. Jeongguk was popular for being his friend. Sometimes he wondered if it was his fault, that his own resentment of them, those who had taken, stolen his friend from him was making him feel like the feelings were mutual. But whether it was his fault or theirs, he always felt like he didn't fit in. He didn't like being in the spotlight. He didn't drink, wasn't very outgoing, didn't like attention, especially when it came from girls. As Taehyung was off the market, they tended to be interested in him. He hated it, and they soon realised they did too; his walls were so high for anyone to have the patience to tear them down. So eventually, they left him alone. He was thankful for it. To him, girls were a complication, they bombarded his life and demanded things that he didn't want to or didn't know how to provide. Junior year was full of first relationships, kisses, sex and Jeongguk was scared of that; the entire year he felt he was on the verge of running out of breath. All he had wanted was to stay in that little bubble he, Taehyung and Jimin had made for themselves. But Taehyung didn't want that.

      After junior year, he felt entirely burned out, and so when senior year came round, he distanced himself from Taehyung's crowd and started spending every free minute he had with Jimin. Things got better. He stopped caring about what the people at school thought of him. What Taehyung's friends thought of him. But he could never stop wanting Taehyung's attention, which dwindled more and more as the year passed. Not in the sense that he didn't want to be around him. Whenever they met and hung out, he was fully there. But he was never the one to ask. He was too busy. But that didn't been it didn't hurt.

      Until Jeongyeon and Namjoon. They had started seeing each other around the same time Taehyung and Mina did, but during senior year their relationship grew more serious, and Jeongguk and Taehyung started seeing each other again. Family dinners, game-nights, week-end trips, time Jeongguk found himself craving. He found how much he had missed him, which was why he was so happy to hear of the engagement. It was a reassurance for him, of sorts. A reassurance that he would have Taehyung in his life, as a sort of brother, forever.

      And still, even with that reassurance, it wasn't enough.

      He let out a shrill exhale and threw the photograph on to his bed. He couldn't bear to look at it. Mina's content face, the way she leaned against Taehyung; or worse, Jimin's laughter and his clear comfort, the confidence he bore towards the girl on the bench.

      All this time, he had known. He had always seen through her demise, seen who she really was. He had always hated her. And now he knew he had been right to. She had come into his life, into all their lives like a parasite. Her ideas bled into Taehyung's words––Mina told me once ... Mina thinks that ... interesting, Mina was saying the exact same–– hers and Jimin's fashion became more and more similar, as they went together on shopping trips, and they started to resemble those siblings whose mothers would coordinate the wardrobes of. She had even tried to get to Jeongguk, through photography. Countless times she had asked him his opinions of her photograðhs, how he thought best to execute a certain technique, asked him how on earth he was so talented, how he managed to make his photographs so raw and Jeongguk retreated, thankfully so, because she was a hawk, wanting to gnaw its way into his work, into his mind, and snatch it in its claws, fly away.

      And now she had gotten Jimin. He had paid the price of Taehyung's affections.

      Why, oh why, had he not been persistent in his worries? Why had he let her enter their lives and fuck everything up so ferociously? Why hadn't he warned Jimin, told him to stay clear of her, or better yet, dragged him by force far away from her? Kept him safe?