OPERATION CUPID

OPERATION CUPID

howdy :) so, the characters you're about to read sort of sprung out of their own volition as I worked on a namjoon fic. I wanted to see how these scenes would do as standalones, as little slices of life, peeks into the daily ups and downs of the cast. scenes proceed in no particular order. sometimes chronological, sometimes as time-skips. I'm just going with the flow, wherever the tide takes me.

wc: 3.0k

tracklist: 'halley's comet' by billie eilish, 'pink skies' by lany, 'safety net by ari g

tense and POV: 3rd and present

ep. 2 | AO3

OPERATION CUPID Classified Excerpts

Jimin is lean, and comparatively small when standing next to Namjoon. His hands are chubby, and his fingers are stubby. None of this, however, subtracts from his agility and his swan-like elegance even as he glides across a fifty-year-old, small-town diner at rush hour.

It's the kind of awe-inspiring grace that belongs on stage, spotlit amidst tule skirts and disciplined ballet point shoes. The kind of grace that is chiseled to perfection through years of arduous practice and patience.

Norah, who is sat on a swivel bar chair behind the register, takes inventory of crinkled green bills. Between lining the bills with a few taps against the counter and reaching over to scribble on a tracking sheet, she steals glances his way.

She wonders just how many falls it had taken him to trust his quick and light footing not to betray him. How many bruises he'd acquired and endured to no longer fear pain.

Jimin never seems to catch on to her stray glances, or the twinkle in her gaze every time he comes into frame from behind the shoulder, or broad back, of a customer that shuffles in, or out, of the establishment.

He's used to having eyes affixed to him; feels comfortable in the spotlight, in crowds. Naturally charming and approachable, he makes friends left and right, and talks to them as if they are years-long acquaintances meeting over dinner. How's your family doing? My, that must have been so hard for you! Say what, here's a plate of Saturn rings, on the house. He'd wink and utter something, while holding a hand to their shoulder, about keeping it a secret from the boss, Namjoon.

Norah would wince. It's not like they are financially flexible enough to afford freebies.

As for Namjoon, he'd pretend to have not seen anything.

Jimin gently sets down a tall glass of strawberry milkshake, adorned with a dollop of white foam and a single, shimmering cherry on a table where a customer is hunched over a book.

He'd noticed, on his glide her way, that she'd been pensively entranced, entirely engrossed in the blotchy ink of the pages, brows pinched beneath the slight part between her curled bangs.

He didn't want to interrupt her careful consideration. It appeared of utmost importance, and if not that, than at least of utmost enjoyment. In the case of the latter, she had a peculiar way of displaying it (enjoyment).

At the drum of the glass's rim over the wooden table, the woman snaps her head to capture his studious gaze.

The pinch of her eyebrows dissolves, much like the foam atop her drink, and becomes replaced with an appreciative smile.

"Is it any good?" He glances, suggestively, at the book she'd hurriedly closed over her forefinger, which she'd been using as a make-shift bookmark.

Her cheeks and ears grow flushed, as if it were a shameful thing to enjoy reading.

Jimin wonders if it's the nature of the text that makes her so bashful, hiding her blush by flattening her bangs.

Regret hardens like cement over his feet, leaves him paralyzed to assess her response.

"Ah, this?" She drums her fingers over the hardcover, and it resonates wonderfully crisp. "Quite unexpectedly, yes."

Jimin's smile returns, as does his graceful fluidity. There's a single crooked tooth that peeks through when his smile reaches his eyes. It's just barely noticeable. It's Norah's favorite detail.

Unaware, the woman elaborates further: "You see, a friend of mine-" She halts as if holding a mental debate over whether that was the proper term for it. She shakes her head, dismissing the flurry of questions and doubts brought forth by a simple six-letter word. "It was his choice for the month. We have this thing where we trade books after each turn. We read each other's margin annotations, and sometimes try to identify doodles done in the likeness of classical art pieces. It's our way of getting to know each other."

"It's unexpected because," she explains in a sort of round-about way, "he knows, and knew while picking out this title, that I loathe Nietzche."

"Ah, that's lovely! It's a clever take on penpal-ship," Jimin quips.

"Oh!" She chokes a chuckle down, not meaning to sound so excited.

She hadn't been able to conceal her smile at the mention of the friend; Jimin had caught on to her wandering, dreamy gaze falling down at the book's cover amidst her recollection. "I hadn't thought of it like that, but now that you mention it, it is, isn't it?"

Perhaps only now made aware of her rambling by the holler of a nearby customer for Jimin's attention, does she let her voice diminish and takes up interest at the glass before her. Condensation dotting her fingertips.

"In short: Yes, it's good." She takes a decided sip of her drink, the foam smearing her upper lip only for a second before she licks it away. Her eyes expand and soon enough she's eager for another sip of the decadent drink. "As is this!"

Jimin's turning to tend to the customer who had been hollering and whistling for his attention. He halts mid-step, and swivels back to face her, doesn't leave her table until he prompts: "You should tell him you like it over coffee, chocolate, or even a milkshake sometime. Step out of the pages, the margins."

"No-" she stammers. "No, no." It's more a bid to persuade herself out of pointless delusional than it is an attempt at shutting him up.

"We've never talked about meeting," she adds. "I think it's a mutual desire to keep it anonymous. It's perfect like this, safe from external pressure to be anything more than two friends bonding over literature and internal jokes."

"Perfect's not real," Jimin responds. "Forgive me for being pushy, here, but if you like him, as you appear to, why only limit yourselves to footnotes in each other's lives?"

"That's a preposterous proposition!" She hides her blush this time behind the rim of the glass she brings up to her lips, and what little frothy cream is left. When she sets the mug down, a triumphant smile momentously strikes her face like lightning at the realization she'd weaved in her word-of-the-day so subtly, and with added alliteration.

She continues, reigning in the smile (Jimin wouldn't get that inside joke): "How can you like someone you haven't even met?"

"Haven't you, though? Met him, in a sense? I'd argue you're intimately aware of all the pages of his life, like that little book of yours." He taps the sturdy cover lying on the dinner table before bowing away, leaving her to ponder - not before slipping a circular coaster beneath her drink as it had already started to condense.

Namjoon would get on him about the wood, how old it is, how delicate, how financially inflexible they are.

For, possibly, the first time in her life, since she was an infant, she sits in silence. The concerto of intriguing words playing in her mind falls mute. All diction and syntax is replaced with a profound note of realization. A note she ushers to silence, lest anyone else hear. A note that's her secret - like a bookmark, or dollar bill, sticky note, or receipt shoved between pages and preserved over time.

After tending to the demanding customer with an unwavering smile, Jimin glides around the counter and rubs shoulders with Norah, who is still hunched over the register — has been for the past half-hour, impatiently stabbing her fingers over its blank screen.

Fucking Mercurcy retrograding; it always had to cause some sort of glitch. She always happened to find herself dead-center to its discovery.

The register had functioned fine for Namjoon just an hour ago. Now, it'll appear as if it was her doing. How much of a deduction would that be from her paycheck?

Oblivious to her inner turmoil, Jimin whispers over her shoulder: “It’s her.”

At Norah's lack of enthusiasm, he repeats himself, only now forcing her gaze onto his suggestive one.

Norah's face twists with bewilderment. "Who?"

Jimin casts his eyes at the star-dotted ceiling with an exasperated roll. Then, he slams his shoulder cloth down on the counter (more for dramatic effect than intimidation) and subtly nods in the direction of the bibliophilic woman.

Norah squints. Unamused, she blankly stares back at Jimin. Irritation is starting to settle on her face.

"Namjoon's penpal," he finally comes out with it, spells it out with each syllable as if it had been painfully obvious all of this time.

At that, her chocolate eyes light up, the way they do after her first espresso each morning.

Jimin crafts up this "amazing" (his words, not Norah's), and densely convoluted plan to stich the two up. He's convinced that just because they don't glide at his swift pace, they are helplessly in need of intervention, lest they waste their youth away pining and brooding aimlessly.

Norah holds her refutes deep in her chest, merely lends a curious ear to his inspired rambles. An assumption bubbles to the surface of her mind that this hyper-fixation with establishing a romantic interest for Namjoon was only a projection of Jimin's own scarcity in the love department. Even since he'd become a single father, he'd not had much time, space or privacy to afford a fling.

And even if a desperate fling did happen to materialize itself at his front door, he'd kindly decline; stringless hook-ups are no longer his thing. He's looking for something solid, something long-term. Thinks baby Byeol will benefit from a feminine role-model.

He's trying his best as a father, and in his defense, that's more than most absentee fathers out there, but he's fearful that as she grows, he'll be of less use to her. All he has to worry about now is feeding her, bathing her and providing a roof and clothes. Later, he'll have to procure answers to increasingly difficult questions.

Regardless of the intrinsic motive, Jimin's buzzing, talking a mile-a-minute as he walks circles around the diner.

Norah furrows her brows as she hoists a chair onto its corresponding table.

Jimin likes playing Cupid a little too much. He forgets that those red-tipped arrows are sharper than they seem in folklore. Perhaps Cupid wasn't born blind, rather his own carelessness with those arrows blinded him before he learned fates weren't something to toy with when bored and idle.

Jimin's first warning arrives in the form of Norah's apprehension. "I don't know, Chim," she whines.

His eyes round with quiet concern, and he cranes his weight onto the edge of a table. Crosses his arms over his chest, a stained rag dangling between his hold.

"Why? Why not? Don't you think Nam deserves some excitement? All he ever does is overwork himself and play the same miserable song over and over. " He shoots a deathly glare at the vintage juke box at the edge of the bar at the mere recollection.

"He's young. Has a build most girls would gawk over." He's listing the attributes on his stubby fingers. "Smart, kind, generous- I mean, do you think any other boss would put up with my BS on a daily? The man's an angel."

In the dim light of the overhanding star lights, Jimin's eyes glisten, and he averts his gaze, fearful his composure will crumble.

"He deserves happiness, Nor. if this all goes up in flames, he deserves a speck of happiness to carry him through it, guide him to a new horizon. This can't be his everything, because as soon as it falls, so will he."

"You're saying he needs a safety net."

"Yes, exactly! A safety net." He recites the term, weighing its shape on his lips, surprised at how properly it fits.

Norah weakly hoists the last of the chairs. "I thought that was us. You know? Us three, to the end?"

"Nor..." he frowns, launches his weight off the table he'd been reclining himself against, and saunters his way through the maze of stacked chairs to Norah. "We will always be there for one another, but you and I both know there are things he carries in secret. Things he keeps from us, for our sake. Maybe she'll crack through his shell, and make it less..." He looks for the word somewhere over and past her head, and physically palpates the air for its shape. "Less...you know...less heavy." He's not please with the selection, but it's the only word that comes to mind in that instance, and bears resemblance to the abstract idea of his mind.

"Maybe he'll allow her, unlike us."

"I get it. I hear you. I just don't know how to feel about this. What if it blows up and he hates us for it?"

Jimin takes up the role of devil's advocate, an un-orthodoxically hopeful one: "What if it works out wonderfully well?"

"Fine," her agreement falls flat, but he makes up for her lack of enthusiasm by doing a little fist hoist in the air.

She grabs his wrist and forces his gaze back onto hers. "This is Nam we are talking about. We need a good plan and an even better execution. Absolutely no room for fuckups."

"Hey, Jimin?"

"Hmm?" His gaze flies up at the sound of such formality, and the absence of the familiar 'Chim.' His furrowed brows frame a set of eyes rounded with concern. They scan her countenance, attempting to pick up on subtle, unspoken moods that could explain that sudden change.

"Whatever happens -if this place goes belly-up..." Norah does a motion with her forefinger, its silver band reflecting in the waning amber of evening. "We'll still be..." her gaze dances, unsteady between his steady and attentive one, but she proves incapable of holding it.

Circling the bands around her now clammy fingers, she orders her thoughts, lines her words over the plateau of her tongue. Like perfectly placed and aligned dominoes, she intends to let them charge forth with unbridled momentum.

But instead, they clank awkwardly and with no set rhythm as she stammers between what should be said, and what should be censored, eternalized to secrecy.

"It'll be us three, forever, right? Nothing will change?" Of course things would change, drastically. Namjoon alone would have to uproot his life to comply with the terms of agreement he'd established with his parents in allowing him to take-up the risk of running the diner. That alone would suggest him moving away. Communication between the three would fall, their bond crafted over years would loosen and come undone like an improperly fastened knot, or one that just wore away, sun-bleached and tattered.

He wants to procure a worthy response, to at least undo the tears starting to form on her lash-line, but he can't bring himself to lie to her. Nothing was certain. Not ever, and certainly not now.

He would be lying if he denies having scouted for jobs online once he puts Byeol down to bed each night.

It's less about holding different jobs than it is about the distance between those routines. The fall-out wouldn't be palpable during the first few months as they would make every attempt to overcome the discrepancy, to meet and chat, with everything being freshly new. Once they were to give into monotony and convenience, though, those meetings would shorten into oblivion.

Perhaps this is why Jimin is so adamant about helping Namjoon conquer love; it's his way of leaving an impression that will outlive his presence in Namjoon's life.

Instead of voicing his reasonable suspicions, he coos, much in the likeness of the tone he uses to calm Byeol. "Hey, hey... It's okay. It'll be okay."

He encroaches with outstretched arms, ready to collect her before she shatters into a million pieces right before him. His small, delicate hands hold her head and stroke her hair.

Norah renders her guard useless, and sheds it with a few tears that stray from her shut eyes. She nuzzles the bridge of her pierced button bose against the side of his neck.

No longer looking into her eyes, he musters a pretty, white lie, sweet like cane sugar, to coax the bitterness of medicine, of reality, of life: "Until the stars burn out."

She wants to call him out on the lack of accuracy in that statement; processes it's fallacy, but stops herself from speaking. Instead, she relishes the embrace as if it were the first and the last.

She allows herself to enjoy the imagery of the sentiment and locks her hands behind his back, just in case the stars do burn out in that instant. In case they drift off into the void together, to face that dark unknown together.

Norah's unspokenly ambitious, hazardly competitive. Rather than boasting about how she's the very best, she'll take up any and every opportunity to one-up her opponent in the most obscure trivia, a match of chess, tennis (you name it).

Her ambition is merely a deep, infiltrating greed that courses through her like an infestation. She's conditioned herself to fear coveting something. Taught herself that to want is to lose; and that vulnerability is dangerous.

She's recited a million times over in her head declinations of her blossoming feelings for Jimin. Every bud that blooms in daylight, she snips in moonlight.

She wants it all. She wants him. She wants forever. She doesn't merely want to buy an extension for the inevitable. She doesn't want to convince herself out of the want. Not with this want.

Something deep inside her is gnawing with want - not the lustful desire kind, rather, the I've been alone for so long that I am touch-starved, and wholly lonesome and tired and I just want a place to rest.

She wishes on every lash of her eyes that Jimin could one day be that for her, and likewise, her for him.

A safe place.

But she also wishes incessantly for the diner's success and Namjoon's happiness, yet the bills continue to pile. With winter unfolding, the crowds are thinning, the diner grows quiet and stale.

Wishing has never proven to suffice. It never has been the magical remedy. Stars are just pretty orbs of light in the sky, not wish granters.

𓍢ִ໋🌷͙֒ this teeny series is lowkey a love letter to jimin for being such a loving, warm person. a literal angel x

𓍢ִ໋🌷͙֒ also, probs unconsciously influenced by peyton x jake oth dynamic (we were robbed!)

𓍢ִ໋🌷͙֒ the ode to jimin continues >> ep. 2

Love Language

LOVE THROUGH ACTIONS, GESTURES, CARESSES AND PROXIMITY. LOVE THAT ISN'T FLUENT IN FLOWERY WORDS. LOVE THAT IS SUBTLY OBVIOUS, TANGIBLE, PRESENT.

NEVERLAND IN AUGUST

I often tell myself I will no longer partake in writing tae fics bc they always turn out excessively angsty and melodramatic, and yet, I find myself here, time and time again.

short version: kth and poor decisions. salty air. beach shore. never meant to be. exchanges that slipped away into moments in time. a secret well kept, and then fallen into oblivion. seashells. skinny dipping. august, except it's not. you, except you are not mine. us, except there is no such thing. you were never mine to keep, or to lose. 

tae's got a neverland complex. doesn't wanna grow up, bc it means leaving behind his freedom, but worst of all, you. or something like that.

proceed, if you are interested in the long version.

wc: 3.7 k

tracklist: 'August' by Taylor Swift

tense and POV: 2nd person and past

You are so easy to fall back into, as though we are molded to fit one another, a lock to its key, and it shouldn't be this easy to self-destruct.

Taehyung slipped away into the night when the crowd had settled and turned its eyes blind; when the topics of conversation had shuffled from his career and marital prospects to rather pettier, popular culture developments.

He averted curious gazes amidst the crowded streets as he meandered aimlessly. Like a compass with a damaged needle, he spun indefinitely, pressed tight between bodies. No sense of direction.

With a flighty gaze, he scoured the surrounding, illuminated buildings for an anchor, a sort of lighthouse, some sort of sign to pierce his attention, slap him hard across the cheek as the ground would if he would only stop falling. If the ground were to catch him and hold him, rather than cave beneath his feet.

Gloomy, dim eyes searched past the silhouettes of the skyscrapers, past the nomadic clouds, which veiled the moon's luminous halo, attempting to make out faint stars freckling the sky.

Not just any stars.

Polaris - a stable point, axis, around which the rest of the world's body falls and rises.

The star he'd chased with his siblings through the playgrounds long ago.

The clouds were too vast and dense, as were the crowds pressing in around him. Suddenly, he felt painfully sympathetic of Polaris's condition; the world seemed to start spinning around him, too; the ground at his feet warping with each unsteady step.

He didn't want to be central, polar. He wanted to be a fuzzy margin, ambiguous, never quite a start, never quite an end. The horizon.

He wanted to be too many things in life, and nothing at all, at once. It was dizzying, to say the least, to be tugged in every direction. To have so many quarreling voices beckoning your attention.

Sometimes he wished he could split himself into a million little versions. Split the burden between them.

He just wanted it to stop. The spinning. The encompassing chatter. The omnipresent stares. All of it.

He dipped into a gas station with a neon sign for a header and pulled the cheapest bottle of red wine from its rack. Rolled it over the counter towards the register clerk along with his upturned ID, only his thumbpad mostly covered his picture and name.

It was a quick swivel, quick enough for the clerk to nod in recognition he was of age; not long enough for them to register the reputation behind the name, the face;

not long enough for a light to flicker in their distant gaze and their mouths to fall slack in awe.

With a lazy grip on the bottle's neck, he swayed and weaved through the saturated streets, often slamming shoulders, until he sank into a dim alley, save for an overhead flickering neon sign, similar to that of the gas station, only just one flicker short of giving out.

He padded his way out to a quieter, sleeping street, and found himself a vacant bench to collapse onto.

It was finally dark, and quiet, and the margins of the world had seemed to settle about him.

There, he conjured up an affair with the shadows until he grew to question whether he'd become one. Whether the star-freckled clouds had encompassed and carried him away, to some distant Neverland. A place that could offer him an eternity to figure out the calls and wants of his heart.

His parents had omitted a truth from him. They'd omitted many through his development, opting for sugar-coating existence, but of all the ones, this one was unforgivable. 

They had never mentioned how it is like the air in your lungs dissipates with each passing year. A blind habit forms: you start holding your breath just to get through a couple of gruesome hours, a shift, the day.

You wait for the afternoon to catch it again, but then the afternoons start growing burdensome in a way uniquely their own. It grows, the weight on your chest, drowns you and kills you slowly. 

In his brief recollection tonight, he supposes they'd been unconvincing in their pretensions. They'd never blatantly admitted this truth but had often insinuated it.  

He should have looked closer, not forsaken the fine details.

He would have noticed the drawn bags lining their eyes, the burst capillaries on the ivory margins.

He would have felt the exasperated sigh leaving their lips while bracing their weight against the counter, just trying to stand another day. 

He could feel that helpless sigh, now. Infact, it had grown to become his. 

A sigh which seeped into the quiet night. 

Quiet, safe for the whir of cars on the highway, a couple of miles back; safe for the chirp of crickets nestled amidst bushes, shrubs.

Quiet, safe for the sudden exclaim of a nearby branch, snapped under unannounced weight. 

Taehyung stiffened and used the bottle that had been resting on his thigh as leverage, in case he'd need to spring upward and dash -though, it would likely be less of a dash, more of a stumble and awkward trot away given his inebriation.

"Boo!" 

He didn't startle, much too inhibited to have reacted within the acceptable timeframe.

Or simply, too unbothered.

Instead, he turned his head with a lazy, drunken gaze and there you were -- his Neverland on Earth, stardust lining your eyes, a shard of magic and dream and impossible possibilities amidst a limiting world.

The stars surely envied you. 

You kicked the air, standing, waiting awkwardly, as if for an invitation from him to sit. You weren't sure if he'd appreciate you intruding on his hideout, even if it was a vacant restaurant patio, with rusted chairs and overgrown ivy.

"They are losing their minds looking for you, you know?" 

"They are?" A smug smile tugged on the corner of his glistening lips. "Let them." He proceeded to lick the gloss away, tasting the bitterness of residual liquor with subtle tones of sweet vanilla and tart cherry. "Are you gonna tattle on me?"

He swung down the leg he'd had outstretched on the bench, opening a space for you. Welcomed your presence. 

Your original reluctance dissipated, formerly pinched shoulders relaxing. 

"I already did," you flaunted, lied, made your way across the patio, crunching over shattered stone. 

As you lowered yourself onto the seat, he gestured the opaque bottle at you, whirling the contents around. 

"If I'm going down..." he started, holding back a hiccup behind puckered lips. For an instant, his face twisted, as if bile had crept up the column of his throat.

He swallowed hard, and quarreled with the nausea wringing his stomach. "I might as well not remember any of it."

You'd feel nauseated, too, leading his life.

Sure, it was glimmery and luxurious, alluring and comfortable by every physical means, with everything imaginable so carefully crafted and tailored. The perfect life.

It was all pretend, shallow. A gilded cage is only ever still a cage, a prison, confinement.

It wasn't him - not the him that you knew. He was a free bird, meant to take flight.

The him that you knew would be up for spontaneous drives to the shore. He'd get lost out of an insistence to avoid using navigation systems. He'd blast every genre of music through the speakers, and somehow recall every lyric, even the ones that were in a foreign tongue. 

The him you knew, would leave his shoes at every corner, flinging them off with irritability, complaining about how sore they made him, managing to turn it into a debacle on how suffocating it is to be trapped.

He'd walk on coarse gravel, all through the city. Come home with the filthiest soles, nothing short of charcoal. He'd defy every norm with the lightest of smiles, come spewing to you about the sights he saw on his adventures, the people he'd met, how he'd played soccer with a couple of kids from the neighborhood, how their mother had served him some jiggae and how it reminded him so much of home.

Then he'd guffaw, shake his head and tell you that it was weird how he could recognize the familiarity of home when he'd never really met it. 

But you were, of course, biased in your belief that the only version of him that existed was the one he showed you. You didn't really - or simply didn't want to - accept that this version could be the manifestation of a persona, a theatrical mask meant to distract something deeper, more fragile, genuine, and lost.

Your accepting company allowed him to be a different version of himself, but it wasn't entirely the truest one.

"Get up." You slapped his thigh and turned the bottle he'd handed over, letting its maroon content pour onto the cement, stain it beyond repair. "I want you to remember tonight." 

He groaned, collapsing his head onto his hands and ruffling his hair into a nest. "I had been enjoying that!" 

"That..." You shifted your gaze to the ground and then back up at him, brows pinched in question. You couldn't possibly be referring to the same thing. "No one could possibly enjoy that. Abominable." You shuddered.

"It was cheap," he justified. 

"You act as if you have no money."

"I don't! It's their money." He thrust both arms into the open air, gesturing to his puppet masters, to the strings sewn into his elbows and wrists.

At all times, he was being watched fall apart at the seams, and was scrutinized. The same life which had been breathed into his infantile lungs, never felt his. Instead, it reminded him of a plotted strategy on a chess board game drawn out for added torture. It wasn't a single, one-time commitment; it was a lifetime of sustaining choices that would remove him further from himself.

"Enough self-pity for one night. Come on." You rose, knees creaking a little. "Let's go." 

"Where to?" He beckoned, still planted on the bench. 

"Somewhere. Anywhere. Nowhere." The offer hung in the air, open to endless possibilities. Potential twinkled in your starry eyes; a million wishes and dreams birthed in a second. 

You smiled, and stardust gathered on your tear line, rained down and dusted his sullen limbs until he was floating, made weightless, trailing after you.

"Neverland."

"What?"

"Let's go to Neverland."

You snickered and it was as if bells chimed, rang, jingled.

"What are you - Have you gone mad?"  Taehyung hissed, dancing his weary gaze across his immediate surroundings. He'd rapidly grown weary, careful of an audience bearing witness to the spectacle you were putting on, in your lacy underwear. Locks of hair danced around your figure in response to a cool oceanic breeze gathering to greet you.

"I am pretty sure this is illegal. Illegal, T."

T, as in Tinker Bell, his personal version of a rose-tinged fairy, with a volatile temper, particularly when things don't follow your script.

Incredulously, Taehyung continued to mumble beneath his breath. The cyclical breath of the sea drowned his protests.

Your bra collapsed onto a mound of sand, forcing his lips mute. Like a fish hauled out of the water, his lips smacked open, shut, then open again, failing to close around the ghost of words he'd thought to say but suddenly drew blank on.

Cheeks burning flushed in that so fae way, you dipped your chin behind the curtain of your hair. 

You shut your eyes for what you were about to do. Mustered the courage to follow through, to not feel vulnerable under his gaze. 

Taehyung's unwavering gaze followed your hands down, before trailing up so fast he saw stars spinning around his field of vision. He felt he'd been thrown into Van Gogh's Starry Night.

Slowly, apprehensively, he let his eyes cascade over your silhouette, which grew smaller in the distance as you raced to the sea, desperate to hide in its embrace. 

Growing envious of it, Taehyung ripped his top off his torso, and stumbled the length of the shore, quarreling with his trousers. 

In his boxers, he stopped close enough for the edge of the tide to graze the tip of his toes. Retracted at the sudden bite of cold. "You are mad, woman." It's no longer a question.

"Look who's talking?" You twirled around, the water caressing your sides, sculpting you with as much love and delicate intent as a historic artist did his marble block. "Isn't this illegal?" 

And something in you fizzled, like the air bubbles frothing against your lips on the crystalline surface. It filled you with confusing pleasure to leave a mark on him. To corrupt him.

You hoped your touch on him - your influence - was permanent enough to outlive all that would proceed. Permanent and deep like etchings on tree barks, or indentations on freshly cemented sidewalks.

The panic in his gaze had long dissipated. It blended into a palette of emotions. All unnamable, indistinguishable, but utterly mesmerizing, nonetheless, much like the colorful horizon behind you. 

Delight. Amusement. Fascination. A twinge of flippant anger. 

You drive me mad, woman.

Orange sherbet. Strawberry pink. Lavender lilacs. 

Mad enough to rouge his own cheeks.

You'd like to stare long enough to acquaint yourself with each and every one of them. To name them all, and find where one starts, and the other ones trails off. 

But the thought of staring, steadily into his gaze makes you restless, short of breath. As if there isn't enough air in the entire atmosphere to satiate your lungs.

You can't name the way he looks at you; it's foreign, but not frightening in its oddity. Still, you can recognize its danger, in that it's not a known way to look at friends.

You reclined your head onto the surface of the water, much as you would against your pillow after a long day. "Oh, it's heavenly, Tae." With your arms outstretched like the limbs of starfishes on the ocean floor, you floated. The salty medium carried the voice of the sea directly into your ears. The sound of your breathing and the beating of your heart amplified.

A bizarre reminder that you were indeed alive.

Splashing and thrashing echoed across the sea, and you instinctively curled in on yourself to find Taehyung visibly grimacing at the cold state of the water.

"Why did I ever think following you was a good idea?"

You beamed, droplets of the salty sea clinging to your lashes, where they refracted the setting sun, and it's like stardust in broad daylight all over again.

"You have to do it all at once. Don't think. Just do," you encouraged, watching as the delicate, thinly defined muscles of his torso flexed and twitched over the surface of the water. 

His gaze was devoid, save for deeply creased brows caught in contemplation. A war with the limits of sensation. He held his arms linked over his chest to preserve heat, or perhaps hide his vulnerability.

Water pooled in the cup of your hand, which you splashed in his direction, aimed right at his handsome frown.

Victory ignited like an ember amidst your eyes. 

He grew to shudder a few arms' length from you. Broad and strong shoulders quivered helplessly.  

"You!" Then, those burnt-honey eyes pierced yours. Glaring. Fixed. 

The cupid-bow lining his upper lip momentously twitched as he repeated himself "You-" His words stumbled over unstable, shallow breaths.

You withdrew into the water's embrace and watched attentively, as the waterline climbed up his finely detailed torso. Outstretched arms grew nearer. Burnt-honey eyes widened in a vengeful craze. Ivory teeth became bared underneath strawberry-red lips. 

A frightened giggle of yours bubbled the water's surface rimming your chin. 

Finally, with an inhale of courage, Taehyung lunged forward, took the blow of the cold front on, and wrapped you in his arms. His weight sunk you beneath the surface. You were a pair of tangled anchors.

Not having stored a breath in your lungs, you squirmed and kicked in his old. His groans were muted by the harrowing echoes of the abyss beneath the sea. 

Strong arms tightened around you and hauled you out. You broke the surface with a desperate gasp, choking for breath between giggles. 

Laughter echoed in his chest, and reverberated through you. It reminded you of the waves and siren songs you grew up believing resided within conch shells as a pig-tailed kid. 

Since having shed your milk teeth and tolerated the gnaw of growing pains that accompanied such loss, you'd given up on childish fables of that kind.

On trips to the shore, there weren't hidden siren songs in the colorful conch shells you held up to your ear. There was only your younger sister cackling beside you, calling you a fool - but only after having tried it for herself first. 

But much as you had convinced yourself siren songs didn't exist inside the shells, you'd also convinced yourself you'd never hear that laugh again. Somber. Baritone. A tad boyish, in the way it would crack unpredictably. So wholly yours. It was a tune you'd looped in your memory from the very first instance you'd heard it.

In that split-second, with his hands fanned over your hip bones, and half-moon eyes tenderly fixed on yours, the fables did not seem so farfetched. New possibilities were solidifying at the tip of your fingers. Your fingers grazed the apples of his cheek. 

The possibilities were whispers in the crest of your ear. 

You'd only needed to get far enough from the bustling commotion of the city to hear them, to realize they'd always been there. 

An abstract somethingness would always exist between you two, just barely palpable.

The champagne had a mildly scorched aroma undermining its light fizz. You grimaced as it burned its way down your throat.

On any given night, you would much prefer a cup of tea to pair with the sacred act of slipping into bed; green, chamomile, on occasion, even aromatic Tulsi. 

But tonight, you weren't trying to sleep, to ease a mild case of insomnia. Sleep would rob you of time both of you knew you didn't have.

After a couple of swigs from the dark bottle, your skin began to buzz. A denseness subtly amounted over you, as though honey were dripped over your body, every move lubricated, viscous.

Your legs were warm, draped over his in a languid, but intimate manner - almost grounding in nature, as if you were his anchor. You tethered him to the present pleasures, kept his mind off the anxious tomorrows. 

His lips were sweet on yours and at times a hint bitter, like something you shouldn't have taken pleasure in tasting. A poison, that grows tolerable the more you ingest, but not any less deadly.

The tolerance being an illusion, an influence of the poison over you, foreshadowing its impending triumph, as you relinquish your willpower. 

That's it. You were dwindling under its influence. Your mind grew heavy, like your limbs, with intoxication. 

It was no longer bitter.

Rather, it became cloying, and you were innately and undeniably insatiable. 

Taehyung hoisted your hips to reposition them over his, desiring your proximity. Possibly as equally intoxicated. The question hung over your heads in the shape of a watchful moon.

Who was the poison? 

The hold on you was rough, but harmless. It was the gentlest rough-grip you have ever been subjected to. You allowed it. 

"I shouldn't do this." Your shallow breath ghosted his swollen lips in torment. 

He nuzzled the distance in desperation, and you obliged, tasting him apprehensively.

Just one peck. 

Then, another. 

And, what if, perhaps you held his lips in place with adoration and reverence. Held them in a warm hug, as if to shield them from the cool breeze blowing in from the sea. 

Would that have been such a crime?

The set of trespassers that tore through your blouse certainly were (criminal). They robbed you of any and every modicum of self-restraint.

You were no longer holding his lips. You had long since graduated to a sculptor, molding them to your will with each measured graze. Simultaneously, you started to circle your hips over his, back and forth, round around. 

"We should stop." Taehyung breathed raggedly into your neck. "Tell me to stop," and it came across as half-plea, half-demand.

You defied him, pulled him close, your breasts flushed against his sturdy chest.

You were definitely the poison.

You were a corrupt, filthy little thing. Loved it when he called you out on it. 

Tonight, he held you like you were something, someone sacred, like you were ceramic at risk of shattering in his hands.

You wrestled his gentle touch, wanting him to defile as he'd done enough times before for it to not be mistaken with error, overwhelming tempation.

You were temptation embodied, but he never once feigned sanctity.

Equally so, if not more, you deeply desired to defile him, to permeate every inch of him until the crime became undeniable. 

Fast, is how it unfolded.

But is there any better way to go?

Live fast, die young, right? Shine so bright you burn out. A phenomenal supernova. Watchers gathered to experience a historic event. 

There certainly wasn't an absolute right or wrong way to go.  But, if there had been, Taehyung was certain that way was fast. To burn like the dozens of stars in the sky, framing the quaint balcony. One moment there, the next gone. 

He knew that his departure approached just as quickly as dawn brightened the horizon. He knew you weren't oblivious to this fact.

Something in him winced at the thought of putting you through it again.

"Tell me to stop."

"Don't stop."

"Tell me to go," he almost begged, groaning as you kissed down the column of his neck. 

"Stay."

He wished he could. 

A ringtone blared across the room, funneling out through the creak between the balcony door and the frame. It said what neither could bring themselves to utter.

Taehyung marched out of the room, half-dressed, delirious but with a direction in mind.

And just like that, the bitter taste returned to overpower your senses.

The whispers in your ears, grew deceiving.

Deceitful little lies. Impossible possibilities.

The possibilities that had grazed your fingertips crumbled into mounds of sand. 

Sand, after all, is only ever withered shells.

Monet's pink paintings.

The truth of the universe can never be known. Never unveiled to be held, married, trapped. It is a free bird rustling the leaves, never seen, only known in echoes and usherings of wind.

-penned by j. m. medna (2024)

the only person you need to be good enough for is yourself