—First life, year 2018—
I took my mother's words to the heart as I finally returned to campus.
But before I started anything with Jungkook, the first thing I did on the day I arrived back at university was to look for my best friend. Which, unfortunately, turned out to be quite a hard task to do. It took me days, numerous texts and phone calls later to finally be able to get him to see me.
"Where the hell have you been?"
No matter how much I kept reminding myself to control my emotions, the frustration that had compiled after not being able to reach him peaked the day he appeared in front of me. If only he appeared at least interested in seeing me, perhaps I would be able to stay calm and talk to him like a decent being. But then there he was, sitting right in front of me with his arms crossed over his chest and his eyes wandering around, looking elsewhere but at me as we sat at a diner close by.
"I've been busy," he said, shrugging.
"Busy?" I scoffed. "I remember you being busy. I know how you are when you are busy and I remember quite well how you would still at least answer my messages or calls. Hell, you never even contacted me to ask me if I was getting any better while I was at home."
"Because I knew you'd be okay as long as you're with your family," he answered with a sigh, yet sounding uncertain himself.
"You don't know that," I muttered, and his eyes found me then. "Even if I was with my family, it didn't mean that everything was doing good. I still needed you. You promised to be there and support me, and instead you just—disappeared."
Taehyung said nothing at first, yet he kept his eyes on me, studying the frown on my face and lightly shook his head. "You are not the only one who has a problem, alright?"
"Then tell me! Talk to me and tell me what is going on with your life. It feels like I am losing you."I pleaded to him, making him wince in his seat. "I thought we were best friends. We used to talk about everything and shared things with each other. I need you, Taehyung, and you have been there for me, so let me help you too."
"You can't—" He released a long sigh and brushed his face before looking at me. "I can't let you deal with my problems too."
I pouted. "That's not fair."
I watched his eyes narrowed. "You are the one not being fair. Stop pouting! You're making me feel guilty."
I could feel his resolve breaking apart that I had to bite the insides of my cheeks to hold myself from smiling. "Well, you should be. Do you have any idea what it was like to have no one to talk to? Someone who was not treating me like I was about to fall to pieces or sounding like they want to explode every time they're talking to me?"
Taehyung raised his brows for a moment, before his gaze started softening. If there was anyone in this world who would understand what or who I was talking about, then the person would be Taehyung. "I'm sorry," he finally said, looking down as he kept playing a straw on the table. "Sorry for disappearing. I didn't mean to. I thought I should give you time to recover and deal with your stuff while I deal with mine."
I nodded. "Yeah, I get it. But really, don't you think that it would be better if we help each other?"
He shrugged. "I guess."
Silence fell between us after. I only leaned back on my seat when he seemed to be mulling over our conversation, opting to wait until he was ready to speak first. It lingered until he sighed, his eyes glanced at me for a quick moment before he said,
"Your Mom called me to let you know that you were back. That you insisted to stay in your flat and try to start catching up before going back to classes next semester," he said, while I perked up. "I, um—I actually went straight to your flat when I figured you must have arrived."
"You did?" I frowned, "Why didn't you say anything? Why didn't you stop by?"
Taehyung bit his lips and seemed hesitant for a moment. Then he released a huff. "I saw you with him."
There was no need for him to explain what he meant when I immediately understood. "You saw me and Jungkook?"
He nodded. "Are you back together with him?"
Why is everyone asking me the same thing? I wondered when his question reminded me of what my mother kept asking me until the day I left home. "What? No—"
"Then why was he the one driving you back? Did he pick you up at home? Had he drove you all the way to your flat then back again?"
"I—" I started, not completely sure how to explain things properly. "He offered to do it. The only other option was for me to ride a bus or a train here because my Dad was still out of town and Mom wasn't feeling so well. She's been getting tired and sick so often because she had to work while taking care of me," I told him. "And neither you or Hoseok was available to help too. I didn't want to trouble my brother and you never returned my call."
Taehyung's face turned to grim and I knew that his regret had just multiplied. "So what? Are things okay between you guys? What's happening now?"
I almost flinched when I caught the bitterness in his tone of voice. Almost. Yet I tried my best to not let him make me feel so small and so guilty of choosing the best option that I had at the time. What was he expecting me to do? "Yes, you can say that. I mean, I've forgiven him. And now we're just being—friendly. And he's been around to help and to support me."
"To forgive does not mean to take him back and give him what he doesn't deserve," he suddenly snapped. And it made me terribly desperate, and tired, and so damn confused. Because here we were making a step progress to mend our friendship only to have it moving two steps backwards the moment Jungkook was mentioned.
"I'm not taking him back," I quickly said, not even bothering to hide my irritation as my voice sounded a little high.
"But you will," he said, or rather, muttered bitterly. His voice was soft and broken that I could feel my chest tightened. But it was nothing compared to the look in his eyes. "I can see it in your eyes," he continued. "It's so obvious that you still have feelings for him. I see it now just as much as I saw it then when you looked at him right outside your flat."
I looked away from him. Of course, I still had feelings for Jungkook. People would not easily erase how they feel for another, but that feeling had changed. Somehow I refused to explain myself to him that I just kept the thoughts to myself. "Why does it matter to you so much?"
Taehyung's lips tightened into a flat line. "Because I know you! Because I care! Because I hate to see you hurt," he huffed. "You always love with everything you have, so when you're hurt, it's like a part of you dies. It hurts when I see you that way."
I felt tears welling up in my eyes, but I forced them away. Perhaps he was right. I did love Jungkook with everything I had and a part of me died when I was hurt. But it was killing me inside when I had to admit them out loud and to think that it somehow affected someone else. There was nothing I could say to him, so I just fell silent.
The moment I turned my eyes to see him again, I was able to mask away what I felt. Yet I could tell that he was still able to see it when he reached my hands, when he held them tight as he said, "Just remember this. He lied to you once. There is always a chance that he will lie to you again. Don't make the same mistake twice."
Between my mother's words and Taehyung's, I felt like I was being torn apart.
At one point, I had already made my decision of moving on, I have thought of the choices that I was about to make. But the more people were trying to tell me what to do, the more I felt like they had no right of meddling with my life.
'Time will tell,' each of them said, making sure that I would take my time before I would ever make any decision at all, that I would focus on my self-recovery—both physical and mental—before making up my mind. But what difference would it make when everyone around me kept pushing their thoughts on me and never allowed me to think for myself? To make my own decision that I knew what would be best for me?
It was then when I started to shut them out of my life. Well, not completely. I still allowed myself to hear what they wanted to say, but I had chosen to only listen to my heart instead of everyone else's voices.
Meanwhile, as my relationship with Taehyung slowly returned to normal, my friendship with Jungkook also grew. At least, at the moment, that was how I looked at what we had then. A friendship.
The constant presence and his attention had been all the same compared to when he was supporting me during my recovery. He was always there to help me when I was trying my best to catch up with the courses I had been missing out on, and had always been so supportive of everything I was doing, not to mention terribly protective of me from any malicious rumours that were going on on campus. Despite his effort of trying to talk about 'us', which I had been trying to avoid, all we had ever done was spending time as friends.
But not due to the lack of trying.
He tried. So many times. Whenever I refused to have our 'talk', he took another turn by asking me out on dates. And what that also failed, he would somehow find other ways to spend time with me.
At the night I refused to go to the movies with him, he came by to my flat with popcorns, corndogs and a large bottle of cola, and turned on Netflix for us to watch together. On the other night, when I refused to have a dinner date with him, he still appeared at my flat, saying that he wanted to make sure I would have dinner by doing some cooking for both of us.
And those were only the most common things he would have done to make sure that I would somehow still ended up spending the night with him.
"You need to stop doing this."
"Do what?" Jungkook merely glanced at me, sending me a quick smirk before he continued cooking. We were at my flat, at one of his usual tricks of getting me to have dinner with him. 'Not a date,' he said. 'Just casual dinner.' But I knew that there was something else up his sleeves.
"This," I told him. "I know what you're doing."
"Of course, you would," he grinned. "It's obvious that I'm cooking."
I sighed. "Jungkook."
Neither of us continued to speak as he set up our dinner. He had insisted that I remained seated as he served everything for our meal and I decided to follow along, wondering what he was up to. When he finally took his seat in front of me, his expression quickly changed. His playfulness turned into somber and the tension in the room quickly grew tenfold.
"If you really want to know," he started. "Then you must have remembered. I already said that I would wait for you. I'll wait until you are ready to actually forgive me and we can start again."
"No, Jungkook—"
"Tell me you don't love me anymore," he cut me off, never looking away. "Tell me that you don't want me."
"I can't be with you. We're supposed to be moving on with our lives," I said, scoffing when a thought came to my mind. One that I then gladly shared with him. "Besides, you can't possibly have been waiting for me. You can't possibly tell me that you haven't been seeing anyone else while I was away. You couldn't even wait when we were together, what makes it so different now?"
I never meant to be so bitter or sounding so hateful. But perhaps since the pain of his betrayal was still there, the sadness and the broken part of me was still strong in me that I just let it slip out so easily. It was too painful to remember everything that I had kept it pushed aside for months. Saying it out loud and bringing it back only made it even more painful.
Yet the pain turned into regret when my eyes found him then and saw him clenching his hands tightly on the table.
"I was an idiot," he said, gritting his teeth. "There is no justification of what I had done, or to how much I have fucked things up. But I will do anything, everything that I could to fix things. I will spend the rest of my life to ask for your forgiveness and show you how much I mean everything I said. To show you how much you mean to me."
Jungkook kept his eyes on me, looking deep into mine all the while he was speaking to me. It felt too much that I had to look away. "Apologies can't change what had happened, Jungkook. They can never bring back what we had lost."
"No, I know they can't. But, ______," he reached out, taking my hand in his to get me to look at him again. And I did. "We can start all over. Start everything from the beginning and make things better."
I opened my mouth to speak, but he stopped me. "I'm not saying anything about forgetting," he quickly said. "I know it's impossible to forget. And I don't want us to forget about the baby. That baby was mine too. It was ours. And no matter how terrified I was back then that I felt the need to run away, it's been hurting me too that we had lost it. I will always regret choosing to run instead of staying. But I can be better. I promise you, I will never again be such a coward and leave you alone during hard times. I will change. I want to change as long as I am with you."
As I took a deep breath, a sob came out of me. I never even realised that I had been crying until then, and only then did I finally feel that my tears had already come flowing down my cheeks. My hand instantly tightened around his. This time, I kept my eyes looking into his when I asked, "Have you really never been seeing anyone else ever since we parted ways?"
"No," he firmly said to me.
Swallowing the sob that was threatening to come out, I asked again, "How about when I was not around? When I was at home? Were you seeing anyone then?"
"No. Not once."
"You can't have been waiting for me."
"I have," he said, taking my other hand that was starting to clench. He was now holding both my hands and leaned closer. "I already said I would wait until you have fully forgiven me. I will only wait until you give me a chance. To give us a chance. And I will continue waiting until then."
"What about—" the words failed to come out when a sob caught my breath. The memory of him with another person touching him made my tears flow even harder. "What about her? The girl you were with? Have you been seeing her? You were with her before, are you not going to go back to her again?"
Through my hazy eyes, I saw him clenching his jaw. "I already know who I want to be with. And that person is not her."
At that moment, every common sense went out the door and so did all my insecurities. Suddenly, I could no longer hear my mother's voice or Taehyung's words in my head. All I could hear was Jungkook's voice and the depth of his words. All I could see was the truth in his eyes, his gaze that showed me everything he was truly feeling for me. And all I could feel was my heart, how it longed for his love ever since the day I lost it.
The next moment, my body moved on its own. I was suddenly moving away from my seat. And before I realised it, I was on his lap, straddling his legs with my arms wrapped around his shoulder to hold him close to me. And everything else became irrelevant as my lips landed on his.
His body went still at first, never expecting to have me kissing him only moments after I had rejected his presence. I kept kissing his lips, ever so gently, but with the desperation that I had been feeling hanging on every touch. I was just about ready to pull away when one of his hands found my waist and the other sneaked up to the back of my neck to keep me close as he moulded his lips so possessively onto mine.
He devoured me with the same desperation as the one I felt, as if he needed me to breathe, taking the air I was breathing in return. His teeth grazed my bottom lip, quickly lapping on it when he heard me moan. The hand that was holding my head tightened as he thrust his tongue gently into my mouth, instantly deepening the kiss. I felt his arms around me, wrapping themselves around my body so strong that all I could feel was his heat, his heartbeat, every presence that was his.
It felt like an eternity before the kiss ended and he let me pull away. Yet it was already so hard to do and neither one of us wanted to part. All we did was kissing and holding tightly to one another, and already it felt like we were moulded into one. Opening my heavy eyes slowly to look at him, my heartbeat paced even more rapidly when I met his gaze. Right then, all so suddenly, my mind was made up.
"Did you mean it? Everything you said?" my words sounded incoherent when my mind was still buzzing with the heat that he had ignited in me and I was still gasping for breath.
His voice was deep and breathless as well when he answered, "Everything. I meant every single word. I love you. I am never letting you go, ever again."
Pressing my forehead on his, I leaned down to kiss the tip of his nose and said, "Then show me. Show me how you are going to fix me."
His gaze darkened. He moved both his strong hands to hold me tightly so that I would not fall as he stood up with my body hanging on his. I instantly tightened my arms around him and my legs around his waist, never looking away from his deep, loving eyes as he carefully carried me away to our bed.
There was no turning back. But both my heart and my body knew what they wanted. And I wanted only him.