TIME AFTER TIME ; jjk

15

"Jungkook, are you stupid? Can't you see they wanted to flirt with you--"

"They were being friendly, but okay."

"You know it well enough that it's more than that and you entertained them."

"Stop jumping to conclusions. I hadn't even spoken to them long enough for you to claim I was enjoying it. Have you not experienced being nice to any of these nurses here?"

"I won't be making presumptions if you can just be less obvious that you enjoy their attention."

"You cannot tell me what to do, Jiwon. You're not my girlfriend." I took a deep breath to pull myself together as we went into the staff room. Surprisingly, nobody was there and it gave Jiwon a pass to be frantic and to grill me with dumb accusations.

"So you admit that you were flirting? I think I have the right to be upset because you agreed on this setup of casually going out on dates with me."

"We need to make some ground rules here if you want this to work out. First, stop being paranoid and clingy."

"I am not clingy. I give you the space you need because you said you're not ready."

I forced a short, painful laugh. "That's because it's what we discussed we should do."

"When the hell would you be ready? You cannot fuck up in front of my brothers when you meet them," she snapped irritably.

'That's another problem. You just can't make me do things without my permission."

"Don't you respect me enough to at least introduce yourself to my people?"

"Well, you can't even respect my decisions..." I ran my hands over my face. Was this really what I wanted? A woman nagging me at work. "How can you turn it against me when we clearly agreed on the same things and you seemed chill about them?"

Jiwon fell silent, and it seemed like what I said had her analyzing her behavior. Her gaze dropped to the ground for a few minutes, her features softening until she caught my hands in hers and gently squeezed them, and when I looked at her eyes, the frustration was quickly gone. "I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. I can't do anything about it anymore because they're adamant on seeing you as soon as possible."

"I hate this."

"I know, I'm sorry, Jungkook." Jiwon draped her arms around my waist and placed her cheek on my shoulder, mumbling her apology.

"You can't be jealous over anything. I'm doing my job and you have to respect my boundaries. We're not exactly together."

She held me tighter. "I can't help it. It scares me."

I slowly pulled away and made her look straight into my eyes. "I'll be honest with you. I don't think we have a future together, but I'm trying, right? Don't do things that make me feel like running away from you."

I had to turn away when tears welled up in her eyes. I hated seeing her cry not because it hurt me but because even when I thought I did nothing wrong and she was clearly at fault, she'd start to tear up, and it would make me feel terrible and guilty. Jiwon was so good at this.

. . .

I found Taehyung and Park Soohyun sharing snacks together during break.

After a moment of hesitation, I made my way over to the two and said hello, taking their attention from their phones before I sat down across from Taehyung. Lately they had been having these meetings over food that happened at weird hours. Most of their interactions involved food and I heard it was usually Soohyun's treat.