About Time | BTS Series (Jungkook, Jimin)

Log. 55: Friends and Foes

"Is that him?"

My head snapped around to find Taehyung standing right beside me. Only that he was not looking at me as he asked me the question. He was looking straight at Jungkook's back until the sight of him disappeared, blending in with the crowd lounging around the stage.

"Yeah," I muttered softly. "That's him. That was Jungkook."

"Were you talking to him just now?" he asked, still not looking at me. And now I was stunned at the hostility in his tone of voice as he regarded Jungkook, even when the guy was no longer on sight.

"I was. I just wanted to clear out some misunderstandings," I told him, wincing when I couldn't even believe my own words.

Taehyung said nothing for a while and only sighed. "Right," he muttered, just as the tension on his body slowly dissipated. He finally turned to look at me then and took a seat, choosing a different chair from the one Jungkook had been sitting on.

I let him take his time to order drinks—an apple daiquiri for himself, since he had started to detest the taste of beer after having a beer meltdown during a party last semester, and a refill of rum and coke for me—while I took my time to settle down my thoughts. There was nothing I could do to wipe away the feeling that Jungkook had ignited in me through his words, from his solid promises and the look in his eyes when he bared himself for me.

"What did you talk about?" Taehyung spoke after taking a sip of his sweet drink, an odd choice for a male if a person didn't know him as much as I did.

"Like I said, we were clearing out some misunderstanding," I said, lifting my glass to hide my lips and stop myself from telling him about the confession that Jungkook had just thrown at me. Taehyung had already spent the last few weeks being mad at Jungkook after I had told him about the kiss. He didn't need to know that Jungkook was thinking way more than just giving me a friendly kiss. "He's different."

"That's not what I was asking. But who am I to judge a person I know nothing about?" Taehyung calmly said, though it still felt like a stab right to my chest.

For some reason, it got me feeling spiteful about it. Enough to turn things against him and asked, "Is he different?"

Taehyung raised his eyebrows. "Namjoon?" he questioned me, possibly already guessing that I was trying to put the spotlight on him so I could reign his anger down, and to stop him from making me feel guilty.

"I'm not sure yet. But you know what I think about these things. About fate. I know that you are the one re-living things. But it doesn't mean I'm not going to change a few things myself," he said with a low voice, looking down on his glass with wonder in his eyes. Then his lips twisted into a wry grin. "He's still a hunk, though."

His comment made me laugh and the tension between us faded.

Looking at my best friend, I suddenly felt glad that I had made a few changes in our lives already even from the very first beginning. I kept looking back to the memories I had of our past lives, our past relationship, and had been relieved that one of the first steps I took in order to make a difference and to fix things was to lay things out in the open.

In the past, Taehyung had been so selfless that he kept putting me first above himself. In order to protect me and my heart, he hid behind his imaginary closet and masked his own identity, which in the end, had led him to hide his problems away from me while I was dealing with mine. He kept his secrets so well, letting me dwell in my own life problems and be blinded to all the misery and pain that he had to go through while he was also fighting to protect me from getting hurt.

That was the reason for our fallout, that I looked past his hurt because I was so engrossed in my own pain that I failed to see him through his secrets. The secrets that wouldn't have been revealed until years later, when he found himself entangled in a jumbled mess caused by a certain someone. And that someone was the handsome, sweet-talking senior who Taehyung had been infatuated and had a relationship with in secret without ever having been able to tell me about it.