Every Little Reason | BTS

15 | Painful Breakup

Ray erupted into another laughter at hearing my words, but after a few seconds, he stopped laughing and suddenly turned serious. His grey eyes pierced into mine as he still kept me in his embrace.

"Then I'd like to ask you the same, Mia. What's the meaning of this?" Ray asked in a dark tone as he showed his phone screen to me.

I flinched a little when the bright screen lit up the dimness of the room. When my vision had adjusted to the brightness, I saw a picture flashed on his phone screen, and at the sight of that, suddenly my breath hitched against the back of my throat.

It was a picture of Taehyung and me, our hands clasped together as we were running away from the paparazzi.

At that moment, there was only one person that popped into my mind when I saw the picture. Surely, the paparazzi didn't know about Ray's contact number. And that led me to the other malicious popstar called Ivy Quinn.

"Did Ivy send this?"

"That's not the point, Mia." Ray stepped down from the stool and exhaled out a frustrated sigh. He took a moment to wrap his face before he turned around to face me again.

"The point is, why did you meet up with that asian guy behind my back when I clearly told you that I don't want to have anything to do with those people anymore?" he confronted me, deep voice dripped with much irritation.

"Ray, I can explain," I spoke quietly as I tried to calm him down. "They came to my workplace–"

"They?" Ray cut me off with a hint of disbelief in his eyes. "You mean you met up with not just one, but with all seven of them?"

"Ray, I couldn't just ignore them. You knew very well that they had something to do with my past," I told him truthfully when the swell of emotions that had been piling up for the past weeks threatened to spill. "You weren't being completely honest with me either. I knew you decided to drop the charges against their company because you tried to keep them away from me."

For a moment, Ray looked taken aback upon hearing my revelation. And it seemed that my sudden disclosure actually had made the both of us realized — that we had been hiding behind the ugly truths all along.

All these times, we continued to play along with the pretense that everything would work out just fine. When in truth, everything was slowly crumbling down, in just a few seconds, right when the last grain of sand free fall to the bottom of the hourglass.

Ray took the last shot of his brandy before he slammed the glass on the island table almost angrily that it startled me. "That's because I'm trying to protect you, Mia. Jasper told me everything, the first time he found you–"

"I know," This time, I was the one who cut him off daringly. "I heard your conversation with Jasper that night."

A temporary silence crept in when Ray looked surprised at my knowledge of their little debate on that night. But when he had recovered, he arched his brow darkly at me.

"Then why did you still honor the presence of people from your past, Mia?" He continued questioning me, but I just found myself muted at his inquiry.

Because I wasn't sure myself why I decided to spend the seven days with the boys when I could just push them away. I wouldn't say that I regretted it either because I knew I enjoyed every second being with them. And I didn't think they were in any parts of my bad memories in the past. That much, I knew for sure.

"And why the hell did you cancel the appointment?" Ray suddenly asked the very question that caught me off guard.

He looked at me with a dark glare that I got scared of him, and it must have been displayed on my face, because Ray decided to distance himself further away from me as he walked out of the dining room to the grandiose living room.