You lock the door, first thing.
It's not that you don't trust Jungkook and the other men, it's just mainly that...yeah, you don't trust Jungkook and the other men.
Lock first, get seen naked never.
The shower is refreshing, washing away any lingering lethargy from your skin and warming you up from the morning chill. Not long after the water starts to pour down from the shower head, steam billows out in waves to cover every cool, slick surface of the bathroom.
It thickens the air, but clears your head.
So much information, so many events in such a short amount of time...
It's hard to handle.
You slept well last night, so you feel a little better, but the stress begins to rise again the moment you think about getting into a ceasefire party and knowing your father will be there, or the risk that Namjoon, Jungkook and the others are putting themselves in to help you gain the liberty you need. They're going to confront their biggest fears, the face of every trauma that keeps them awake at night, all at once and all together.
For them, and for their sanity.
And for you.
When you step out of the shower, it feels like you're stepping out into a sauna.
The mirrors at the vanity are clouded over with condensation, and the stone countertops are beaded with droplets if moisture. The steam is so thick that you almost can't breathe through it.
Wrapped firmly in a towel that's tied under your arm, you gently unlock and crack the door to let some of the steam release into the cool, clean air of the bedroom before you get dressed.
As you wait to be able to properly inhale in the muggy air, you swipe a hand down the mirror, inch by inch revealing your own reflection captured in the misty surface.
Your hair is wet and stringy, darker than normal with the weight of the water, and your skin is flushed rosy by the heat.
So overall, you look like a tomato with strands of limp, dark pasta hot-glued to the top of you.
Wonderful.
If Jungkook isn't gone by the time you step out of that door, you're going to kick his butt.
Then, like your thoughts alone summoned his demon-like person, the cracked door flies open to admit a scrambling, panicked Jungkook into the viscous-aired bathroom.
He doesn't look twice at you in nothing but a towel; instead, he whips around immediately and shuts the door, locks it, then slides over the tile floor to hastily turn the shower back on.
The tinkling rain-sound of water pattering on the tiles begins once again, filling the tile bathroom with echoey music.
"Crap," Jungkook says, "crap, crap, crap. Hide me, Y/N." His eyes are massively round and pleading.
Just as you go to ask him what on earth you're supposed to hide him from and tell him to get the heck out while you're in a towel, a soft knock on the bathroom door makes you both freeze.
"Y/N?" calls a low voice softly.
It's Yoongi.
Whatever Jungkook did, you don't want any part in it.
"What did you do?" you hiss quietly at the man behind you, before sweetly calling out, "Yes? Who is it?"
"Ah, it's Yoongi," answers the other man bashfully. His deep, raspy voice sounds a little embarrassed to be talking to you while you're supposedly in the shower. He clears his throat. "I don't suppose...is Jungkook in there with you?"
In turn, you glare at the idiotic heathen who most definitely is in there with you. Jungkook only gives you a sheepish grin, making sure to keep your body between him and the door at all times.
What a knight in shining armor.
"Why?" you reply casually, trying to keep your voice even. "Did something happen?"
The growl that rumbles out of Yoongi's throat sends subtle chills of terror streaming down the length of your spine. With eyes widened by fear, you glance and Jungkook and seriously consider throwing him out as a sacrifice to the pissed-off ex-mob boss on the other side of the door.
"Apparently," mutters Yoongi, "-yesterday, he overtly implied to Mina that I'm interested in her."
Oh.
"And to keep her off of his back..." Pausing in his sentence, you can hear the terrifying crack of Yoongi popping his knuckles. "-he gave her my cell phone number."
Oh.
Slowly rotating to face the tall man behind you, you rest your hands on your towel-clad hips, setting your jaw as you send him the most withering glance you can muster.
"This is what happens when you go places that your hyungs don't want you to go," you scold under your breath, slapping him on the bicep.
"Y/N?" Yoongi's voice makes you jump.
"Um..."
You look at Jungkook, then at the door.
Jungkook.
Door.
Jungkook.
Door.
Oh holy heck.
You sigh. "Yeah, he's in here witmmf-"
A hand clamps over your mouth mid sentence, and Jungkook presses dangerously close to huff, "I've got blackmail on you. Don't do it."
Blackmail?
What blackmail?
Furrowing your eyebrows, you send him brainwaves full of confusion and irritation. What have you even done that merits blackmail?
You can't think of anything.
So, as you go to shove his hand away from you to give him up, Jungkook stills your movements once more. "You think I'm kidding? I'm not. Do you want to risk it?"
Heck, he does sound serious.
Your frantically wrack your brain for any moment he could be holding as blackmail, but come up blank. What blackmail?
Surely he's not this good at bluffing - the threatening sincerity in his voice is choking you with worry.
Gently, you tap his knuckles with one finger.
Jungkook lets his hand move from where it's covering your mouth, fingers trailing down to rest on your collarbone, long fingers spanning the frontal curve of your throat.
As if he'll cut off your air supply the minute you try to rat him out.
"I haven't seen him," you breathe out to the predatory man on the other side of the door, shifting under the reminding weight of Jungkook's hand on your throat. "I just woke up a couple of minutes ago. I'm sorry."
A thump sounds against the bathroom door, most likely Yoongi leaning his head on it in frustration. "Okay. Thanks, Y/N."
Heart swelling with sympathy for the exasperated man, you whip around to glare at your own personal irritant, knocking his grip from your throat in the process.
"Really?" you gripe, teeth gritted. "You sicced Mina on him? How cruel can you get? And what. Freaking. Blackmail?"
However, as piercing as your voice may be in all of its furious glory, the lack of danger from outside the bathroom has given Jungkook time to process that you're in a towel.
In other words, what you're saying isn't his current priority of focus.
"You are such a guy." Clapping your hands together to call his attention to reminds you of trying to get a toddler to behave. "I'm talking to you, Jungkook."
"Mhm." His black eyes are locked at the point where the edges of your towel come together at your thigh, flashing a tiny sliver of ink-marked skin when you move. The slowly thickening steam from the still-running water only helps to amplify the changing atmosphere, which grows heavier and warmer as Jungkook's eyes darken.
It's an electric feeling that runs like a current through your skin.
Self-consciously, you hold the towel halves together and step back from him.
"Stop that! Why did you tell Mina that Yoongi was interested in her?" Talking might keep him distracted long enough to get both of you out of the volatile environment with all of your clothes on.
Jungkook shifts his weight forward, taking a slow but sure step. His eyes aren't leaving the spot where your tattoo was momentarily peeking out from under the towel.
"Mina?" he whispers, sucking one lip ring into his mouth. "She was clinging. I didn't like it."
He takes another long, slow step toward you.
If you don't do something quick, any desire toward taking things slow is gonna fly out the window.
You raise your hands in front of you, in an almost defensive position. "Hey," you say. "Stop. Just stop. Let me think."
Consideration flashes through his eyes, head flicking to the side so that the silver of his ear piercings surfaces from beneath the inky sea of his hair. The fingers of his hands are shifty, moving, like he doesn't know quite what to do with them.
Or maybe he does know what to do with them.
He does know, but he's holding himself back.
"Think?" Soft, and deadly still is his voice, dark chocolate and velvet. His hair is dampened ebony from the steam, moisture beading on his golden skin and reflecting the lights. "Do you need to think?"
"Yes." Your voice hitches when you say that. "What blackmail? What are you taking about?"
He pauses, a faraway look on his beautiful face as he seems to be reliving the very moment of your inevitable doom. "It was night," he says silkily. "You didn't know I was there. And you said things."
You...said...things?
Oh frick, what did you say?
The fact that you have absolutely no remembrance of such an event makes the horror rolling through your tummy that much more palpable, signaled through what you're sure is a look of utter fear on your face.
Did you have some sort of...dream about him? Surely not. Surely you would have been aware of someone's presence while you were sleeping...
Just as abruptly as earlier, a tiny sliver of a memory zooms through your brain and skitters to a stop in front of your eyes. The warmth of sheets on your skin and a pair of black eyes gazing down at you tenderly.
Oh no.
"You believe me now?" Jungkook whispers, creeping closer with his finger tapping a quick rhythm on the side of his thigh. It draws your attention there to him, to the delicious stretch of black denim across rock-solid muscle.
You can't say that your mouth doesn't water a little.
In fact, you get so distracted by the flex and relaxation of his thighs that you don't realize they've moved closer to you until it's too late.
Jungkook's hand shoots out before you process the situation, wrapping around your forearm and keeping you at a close proximity.
All you can think to say in your semi-panic is, "Slow. We said we'd go slow."
"I know." He nods, like this isn't a problem. "I just wanted to see." His hands are on your hips now, the heat of his palms somehow burning through the thick material of the towel.
And you know what he's talking about. Ever since this earlier, with the muffin incident, he's been edging toward this. Toward you.
More specifically, toward your tattoo.
So, as his left hand begins to drift down, you at least try to pretend that you aren't the happiest prey to have ever been caught by a predator.
Jungkook's breath stalls a little bit when he reaches the part of your towel that's slit open, giving him a glimpse of his handiwork on your skin with every movement you make.
His fingers hover at the seam of the towel, hot like branding irons against your skin. It's almost like he's waiting for the anticipation of the moment to build up in the two of you until it reaches a boiling point, heady and cloud-like in its heated thickness.
Finally, after an eternity of infinitesimal traces of his hand on you, Jungkook hooks his index finger around the seem of the towel and pulls it away.
There it is.
As both of you stare down, somehow breathing heavily despite the lack of cause, your tattoo stands out against your skin like an ink splatter against creamy-tan cloth.
A shaky breath later, and the man breathing harshly beside you lets his fingers fall against the ink and tan, tracing, feeling, pressing.
The flowers are the same as before, connected together by that gently looping vine, but viewing it again in detail after all that's happened seems to reveal new intricacies that even Jungkook wasn't aware of.
Like how the ringed leaf that curls over your hip is the perfect shape to fit Jungkook's thumbprint, and that his hand centered on the vine makes it appear as if flowers are sprouting along your skin from his touch.
They kind of are, you think dizzily as he glides two fingers down the length of the vine, stopping to trace the outline of a flower at your hip.
Although the towel hides everything from him except the span of your left thigh, you might as well be standing here naked in front of him for the vulnerableness shaking your insides.
Jungkook's onyx eyes flicker up to collide with yours, lower lip, rings and all, caught between his teeth.
There's a universe in the vast expanse of his eyes, a galaxy in shades of inky darkness and heat.
Neither of you can look away.
"I've seen it so many times before," he says quietly, huskily, like a rasp is stuck in his throat. "Looked at it, traced it. I designed it. But why does it look so different on you?"
Your heart shrieks in your chest, expanding indescribably with the words.
Both of you look back down, to where Jungkook's fingers are swirling through the design inked into your thigh with loving savourity.
"Y/N," says the man who's holding the rawness of your pounding heart in his hand. "This is going to sound weird, but can I..."
Yes.
You don't know what he's going to ask, but you already know your answer. In this moment of juxtaposed tenderness and lust, you'd do just about anything Jeon Jungkook could ask of you.
"Can you what?" you implore, pretending your voice isn't strained almost to a breaking point.
"For the love of all frickin things, Y/N, please let me kiss it."
[A/N]
Unedited
IT
BEING
THE TATTOO
and nothing else smh I know how you nasties think
OKAY COUPLE OF ANNOUNCEMENTS
A.
Dear Taehyung,
If you're reading this, I'd like you to know that itS nOT oKAy tO POST A VIDEO OF YOURSELF WITH FAKE FREAKING TATTOOS ON YOUR NECK WHILE IM TRYING TO WRITE A TENSE BLOOD INK SCENE. OKAY? GLAD WE GOT THAT SETTLED THANKS.
B.
Savourity is not a real word, but I like how it sounds. Here, I'll give you a definition -
Savourity:
sav-or-ity
- Someone performing an action with an attitude to savour it.
Ex: With savourity
C.
Livestreams times:
Here are a couple of times I might be able to do a livestream. Please tell me which one is most convenient for y'all. [This is all in EST, which is Florida time. Idk what time zones y'all are in so I'm very sorry :( ]
4:00 P.M
6:00 P.M
8:00 P.M.
10:00 P.M.
12:00 A.M.
New chapter should be coming fairly soon. Hope you enjoyed!
❤️PB