Remy would have thought that she would be able to sleep through the night, considering the day she had. But just like everything else in her life, sleep wasn't coming to her easily.
It was strange that it was raining so much. There wasn't a clock in the house, but Remy assumed it to be around two in the morning. The storm had probably begun around two in the afternoon, as crazy as it was. It had felt like night had fallen right after that person had entered the house after them. Then again, maybe that's what extreme storms did. They turned everything to darkness.
She began wandering the farmhouse again and found a nice window that she could watch the storm through where she wouldn't bother anyone. But yet again, she found herself being interrupted by someone walking into the room. Who it was surprised her, though, she had been expecting Jeongguk or Hoseok. Instead, it was Taehyung. He was slightly hunched over and his face was pinched in pain, but he was still walking.
"You really are a boy wonder," she said, walking to him and helping him. He smiled gratefully. It was a smile that Remy could only describe as "loopy". Then again, she couldn't blame him.
She got them to sit down on a beat-up old armchair, then made to stand up and give him some personal space. But much to her surprise, he grabbed her arm and pulled her back down with a surprisingly strong grip.
"Ow?" she said, even though it didn't hurt.
"Sorry."
"Are you okay?" she asked.
He shrugged. "What were you thinking about?"
She blinked at the strange turn in the conversation. "Why do you want to know?"
Taehyung leaned further back into the armchair with a wince. "You had that same look that Namjoon-hyung gets when he's thinking about something that's upsetting him too hard."
"There's a look?"
He nodded. "I pay attention to things like that." For some reason, it didn't seem beyond the realm of possibility. "So?" he pushed. "What were you thinking about?"
Remy shook her head. "Why do you want to know? If it's something that's upsetting you, I don't know if you want to hear it."
"Talking about things can make you feel better, everyone knows that."
It was such childish logic that it made sense. "You sure you want to be burdened by that?"
"You know, you're not a very fun person."
Remy rolled her eyes, but a small laugh managed to escape her.
"There," Taehyung said. "I made you laugh, so you have to tell me what you were thinking about."
"You run a tough bargain, Kim Taehyung."
He gave her an annoyed look. "I don't know what that means."
"Sorry. I mean," she thought about it for a moment, then gave up. "Nevermind. Anyway, I was just thinking about you, actually."
He fluttered his eyelashes, acting bashful. "Aw, you're sweet."
"Shut up. Anyway, so about you being shot-"
He made an expression of pain. "Yeah, ow."
"Will you stop interrupting?" she snapped, and he lowered his head. Well, Remy had just bossed around one of the boys of BTS. She was already starting to regret it.
"Sorry," he said.
"Anyway, what I was saying is that it's crazy that you're so, like, okay."
"Um, my whole stomach hurts."
Normally. Remy would have asked how badly, and what she could do to help. But now she was deep in thought, too distracted by trying to come up with a logical explanation for the impossible. "Yeah, but..." she paused, trying to think of some way that she could tell him what she was thinking. "Okay. So the gun you were shot with, the one that I took, is a Remington 45 ACP 1911 R1 handgun."
He opened his mouth, but she cut him off. "Yes, I'm named after the gun company. Yes, it's a coincidence. Yes, my parents are strange."
He closed his mouth.
"That gun had a four-pound pull on it. Basically, if I tried firing it without with proper stance, just the recoil would make me fall on my ass." She shook her head. "The range that you were shot at, I'm honestly amazed that you're in one single piece and not split in two. I'm even more amazed about how okay you are."
Taehyung had gone pale while she was speaking. "You're saying I should be dead?" he asked.
Remy shook her head. "I'm saying I have no idea how you're not dead."
He pondered that for a few seconds that dragged on. "Maybe something went wrong with the gun."
She was about to half-heartedly agree that his suggestion was entirely possible, but then she stopped herself. "Do you want me to be honest with you? And I say that knowing that when it comes to me honesty and optimism don't really work together."
His features darkened. "Be honest. I put up with enough dishonest shit in my everyday life."
Remy flinched at the poison in his voice. It hadn't been something she had been expecting. Still, she continued. "Those guns are over 100 years old. They don't just stop working. They might jam on a very rare occasion, but that would just stop the bullet from coming out. That gun sure as hell didn't jam."
Taehyung pressed a hand to his side with a nod. "No, it didn't. Then what happened?"
Remy stood up from the chair. This time Taehyung didn't stop her. "I don't know. That's as much as I figured out for now."
"Okay. Were you thinking about anything else?"
She laughed in disbelief. "Are you a mind reader, Kim Taehyung?"
"Like I said, I pay attention."
She leaned down so they were at eye level. "Well then, mind reader or not, you are wrong, Kim Taehyung."
"Damn," he complained. "I thought I was right." He took her moment of triumph to grab her hand and yank her back to the chair.
"Ow!" she said when her ankle cracked against the foot of the ratty old thing. "Jesus, I never thought you to be the beefcakes of BTS."
He smiled, showing teeth that glowed eerily in the light. "Does anything you say make any sense?"
"I think I make sense."
"Everyone thinks they make sense. Even if they don't. Some of us can use that to our advantage."
Remy thought back to all the lessons her mother and grandmother had taught her over the years. To all the times where she would be brought along to company dinners, dressed happily in sparkling gowns tailor-made in bridal shops. Old men and women, businessmen, would all smile at her. She would smile back, thinking them to be polite. But then her mother would grab her chin gently and whisper in her ears that they were snakes. Those smiles were painted clown smiles. Any tears shed were crocodile tears. They were being nice to Remy just for the chance that it would make her mother like them more. If the Laurent family woke up the next day penniless, those snakes would never even look in her direction. She thought back to what her grandmother would teach her to do: to play with her hair, to bat her eyelashes, to look like nothing more than an innocent flower that spends more time staring at the sky than the ground, but to really be the serpent that lives under the flower.
"You are to think quickly if you are to survive, mon amour. True, vultures fly fast, but hawks are faster. Hawks see things no one else sees, and that's why they are the hunters and the vultures are the scavengers that eat the leftovers."
Her father would try to save her from these lessons. He would run into the room, see his mother-in-law drilling her daughter like she was training to be an assassin, and run to the little girl shifting in her seat uncomfortably. She would look at him with glittery eyes, silently begging to get her away from her grandmother. And he would. He would pick her up and place her on his hip and give her grandmother a stern look, telling her that children shouldn't hear such things.
The old woman would jump as quickly as she could to her feet and point one scraggly finger at the girl, a frightening mein of decades of hardened power and being a matriarch of a powerful and wealthy family. "She will need to know these things if she is to be a woman with my name," she said. "You underestimate her. She will grow up to be smart and strong, and she will have the Laurent name. She will need to know these things for when she embraces her full potential."
It was the only thing her parents would discuss after every visit to her grandmother's house. Her father would argue that the old woman was delusional and really ought to go live in a senior center that could help take care of her. Her mother would tap the steering wheel with one finger and say that although her mother did have her moments when she acted a bit strangely, it didn't happen often.
It went unsaid that she only ever had those moments when she was with that very one specific grandchild. For all of her other grandchildren, she was every bit the wonderful, cookie-baking grandmother that everyone thinks of when they think of grandmothers. But around that little girl that enjoyed wearing fancy dresses and having tea parties with her father, the old woman turned to marble, drilling strange lessons into the girl's head.
"Remington?" Taehyung said.
Remy blinked and shook her head. Right. She was with Taehyung. In the old farmhouse in the middle of the desert of California. Because she had been kidnapped along with the freaking boys of BTS.
"Yes?" she said back.
"You were pretty out of it just now."
"It happens."
Taehyung raised an eyebrow. "And people say I'm weird."
"You did just do a total 180 and went from being all sorts of cute to being almost creepily serious. I would say that we're pretty equal right now."
He made a throaty noise of annoyance and rolled his eyes. "Fair. Tell me something else."
"Excuse me?"
"Tell me something else that bothers you."
"Oh, come on!" she complained. "You're so bossy!"
Taehyung grinned again. "Tell me something," he said, poking her in the side with one finger.
Remington felt her face heat up, and she slapped his hand away. "If you ever do that again, I will smack you right across your pretty face."
His grin only grew. "Let me guess. You have a brother?" he asked.
"Obviously." Even though she meant to sound threatening, her voice broke into a giggle by the end of the word. Her counterpart seemed proud of himself. "Alright, fine," she said. "I'll tell you something. But it is something that upsets me."
His grin turned into a serious expression. "I'm listening," he said.
This time, when Remy got up, he didn't stop her. She walked to the nearest window - which was a grimy thing that needed a wash a decade ago. Small raindrops created little rivers of cleanliness on the glass.
"When I was in high school, it became well-known that even though all the guys thought I was hot and my parents are pretty wealthy for the area, I couldn't keep a boyfriend. I don't know why I couldn't. They'd just walk out on the first date and then never showed their faces again."
Taehyung looked surprised. This likely wasn't the conversation he had been expecting. Thankfully he had the decency to just nod to show he was listening.
"So it became a joke throughout the whole county that all the boys from all the nearby high schools would go on one date with me. And it only counted if we fucked. So they would all say these cute things to me, maybe buy me candy or flowers or whatever. And then we were on the actual date, they only cared about getting fucked. Then when that was done, they would go and brag about it. That the weird, pretty rich girl that only had one friend now fucked them."
"They were using you?" Taehyung asked. "Like it was all a big joke?"
Remy shrugged. Her elbows were getting cold against the window. It was, after all, winter, even in the desert. Still, she didn't move. She thought about the jacket upstairs that smelled like Chanel N°5 and Namjoon, wishing she had it on. "In a way. But it was more like a transaction. They were using me, but I was using them too."
"What do you mean?"
"I could have said no at any time. I could tell them that if he wanted to get screwed so badly, he could go flirt with any of the other hundreds of girls in all the local high schools. But I never said no, I always went along with it. And I think it was because even though I knew that it was just a joke to them, during those dates I could pretend that I was happy. I could pretend that I was just a normal high school girl on a normal date, not some teenage freak that was trying to forget all her sorrows by making a transaction with boys that were pretty much strangers."
She glanced at Taehyung, who was staring at his hands in his lap. "The good news is, I don't do that anymore."
His eyes were glossy when he looked back up at her. "What stopped you?"
Remy went to him and took one of his hands in hers, running the tip of her fingernail over the individual fingers and over the blue veins on the bruised wrist. "I found seven boys that I could pretend with without it being a transaction. Because at the time, they didn't know that I existed."