COMFORT OF STRANGERS|| VKOOK ✓

3. Shelter

Jeongguk doesn't see Taehyung the next night. He ends up sitting alone at the bar for 2 hours, ordering the same orange Aperol Spritz from the first night and saying the occasional word to Namjoon whenever he asked. It was long and lonely, and annoying for Jeongguk to keep looking up whenever someone approached the bar, and finally after Namjoon's sympathetic face had gotten to its most severe, Jeongguk had given up and trudged dejectedly back home.

His painting will have to wait another night. He wishes he weren't like this. As he had left the club he had contemplated mingling, finding someone else to bring home tonight, but had ended up leaving alone anyways. His inspiration is annoyingly linear, and when he is fixated in the middle of a piece, there can be nothing else to satiate him. He knows himself well enough by now to know that there will be no one else until the Taehyung painting is finished.

Jeongguk tries not to think too much about it as he lays across his couch to glare at his nowhere-near-finished Taehyung mural. Taehyung had his own life, surely, and could abandon some things just to go spend time with Jeongguk at a bar.

It's not like Taehyung really got much other than a conversation out of it all, anyways.

But maybe Taehyung was bored of him. Maybe, while Jeongguk was trying to run out the inspiration Taehyung gave him, he'd dried out his own intrigue to him. Maybe he had moved onto someone new, not that there was really much to move on from.

Jeongguk tries not to think too much about that. It feels too much like rejection, a hollow pit in his stomach. He never went further than one night with anyone for just this reason.

He liked being the one to end things. He got to choose who he talked to, and how long they spoke for. He never gave them a chance to cut him off, because chances were if they were done with him, he was already long done with them, and had gone before they'd even gotten a chance to turn him down. So the territory of a (friend?) relationship other than Jimin was beyond anything he was used to.

(And Jimin didn't count. He'd been around for 6 years, having met Jeongguk in their freshman year of university, when Jeongguk still made friends and dated and looked at the world and the people in it with stars in his eyes.)

Sometime during his spiral of doubt and self-hate, Jeongguk must have fallen asleep, because the next thing he knows, golden morning light is filtering through his thin curtains and his door is flying open with a bang that has him jumping up and falling off the couch with an unceremonious thud.

"Ow! Fuck!" His head had hit the hard edge of his coffee table on his way down, and the world is spinning now.

"Should have slept on your bed like a normal person." It's Jimin, of course. Jeongguk knows no one else would stroll in like he owns the place and then not apologize for scaring him into a head injury. Besides, he's the only person who has Jeongguk's spare key, and thus is the only one who can do any gate-crashing in the first place. "It's so dark in here, Guk, what are you, a vampire?" Jimin throws open the curtains, and light floods the room.

Jeongguk rolls his eyes and immediately regrets it when pain shoots through his skull. He groans, squinting now as he holds his head and glares in the direction of the intruder. "Dude, what the fuck? I was asleep!"

"It's almost noon, idiot. And—oh fuck, what's that?" Jimin's attention is stolen away from Jeongguk as he turns toward the wall. Having spent so much time staring at it, Jeongguk had forgotten that no one else had seen it yet.

"My new painting." Jeongguk stands up, and the room spins. He doesn't need to be up anyways, so he flops back over onto the couch, turning into the cushion and curling into a ball.

"Your landlord's gonna hate you."

Jeongguk grunts. "He'll get over it." Besides, as a tenant Jeongguk is relatively unproblematic. He knows it'll only matter if he doesn't do something about it should he end up moving out. It'll suck, but he'll do it.