#arrogant

01

note: hello hello!!!🤭 i was so excited to get back to writing, and create. this is the first chapter of my new series,therefore i really hope you’ll enjoy it! love, nini 🩷

🖋️: 1.6k

“If you once more pass that ball to my actual balls, I swear to god Cassian, I'm going to kill you.”

chapter 14

out of bounds

Synopsis; one lives in a world under the weight of shadows the other lives in a world that screams.

"The sky is blue like Sacrifice by Elton John"

warnings; swearing, heavy themes pairing; jeongguk × female reader genre; angst, slowburn, smut, fwb word count; 10,5 k

a/n: hello hello. quick update i know. thing is,,,i’ll start finals soon (bummer) so the updates will take exponentially longer. i’m feeding yall now so you don’t miss me too much.

—

The quiet of the hallway was a different kind of quiet—not deadened by acoustic foam, but expansive, damp, and smelling faintly of rainy asphalt.

You walked toward the humanities fountain, and goddamn, your muscles were aching. It was a deep, heavy ache, the kind that radiated from your thighs and the small of your back, but it was an entirely good way to hurt. It was the physical proof of an eviction. For sixty minutes, your body hadn't belonged to your racing thoughts, or to the devastating humiliation Minho had left in your chest; it had belonged entirely to the friction, the noise, and the ruthless, grounding weight of Jeongguk.

You had finished. Genuinely, entirely finished.

Even more jarring was the realization that you had finished from oral, which was something practically unheard of in your past sexual escapades. Usually, that part of it was a performance—a chore of adjusting your angles, worrying about how you looked, or quietly waiting for the other person to get tired and move on. But Jeongguk hadn't been looking for a performance. He had taken care of you with a clinical, hyper-focused discipline, tracking the hitch in your breath and the tension in your hips until he delivered exactly what you said you needed. He had systematically dismantled your panic and replaced it with exhaustion.

But as the cool evening air hit your face, clearing the lingering scent of his strawberry-mint breathe from your senses, a persistent question began to hang in the space between your ribs.

Did you deliver your end of the deal?

He had been meticulous, unbothered, and entirely in control, but did he actually get what he wanted? Did he feel whatever it was he needed to feel, or had you just been a chaotic, frantic mess that he took apart out of sheer curiosity? It was impossible to tell with him. The deal was transactional, and the hour was up, leaving you with nothing but the ache in your bones and the sudden, terrifying silence of his absence.

By the time the stone perimeter of the humanities fountain came into view, you forced your shoulders to drop, fixing a practiced, unbothered expression onto your face.

Sora was already there, pacing under the amber glow of the courtyard lights, clutching a plastic container of warm soup like a shield against the damp evening. But she wasn't alone.

Leaning against the concrete pillar beside her, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his oversized jacket, was Jimin.

"Finally!" Sora exhaled, her eyes sweeping over you the second you stepped into the light. "I was about to start a search party. You look... completely wiped out. Are you okay?"

Before you could construct a believable lie, Jimin straightened up. His dark eyes locked onto yours, sharp and instantly assessing, cutting right through the casual shrug you were trying to manifest.

"I'm coming too," Jimin announced smoothly, his voice cutting through the space between you. He reached into his pocket, the familiar metal jingle of his keychain echoing in the quiet courtyard. "And obviously, I'm driving."

Jimin's car was a very sexy, polished Mazda Miata—because, of course, that was Jimin for you. It was sleek, immaculate, and possessed a low, purring engine that felt entirely too sophisticated for a campus parking lot.

You've been told in the past it's a red car and that it's "very Jimin" so you just rolled with it.

As Jimin unlocked it, the headlights cut through the misty dark, reflecting off the damp pavement in sharp glints. You braced yourself to open the passenger side door, expecting Sora to claim it, but she bypassed the front entirely and yanked open the back door.

"I am taking the rear," Sora announced, practically tumbling into the back seat with a dramatic, full-body sigh. She threw her legs across the row, completely unbothered, and propped her chin up on the headrest. "Do not argue with me. I have been hunched over a canvas for seven straight hours trying to calculate pillar girths for an architecture project, and if I have to keep my spine at a ninety-degree angle for one more second, I am going to snap in half."

"Pillar girths?" Jimin echoed, a slow, amused smirk tugging at the corner of his lips as he slid into the driver's seat. He adjusted his rearview mirror, his eyes briefly flicking to you as you climbed into the passenger side. "Sounds thrilling, Sora. Truly."

"Shut up, Minnie. It's a nightmare," she groaned from the back, shifting her weight to get comfortable. "My eyes are literally crossing. I just need to stretch out and pretend the physical world doesn't exist for twenty minutes."

You closed the passenger door, the solid, expensive thud of the Mazda sealing the three of you away from the damp campus air. Sitting in the front seat suddenly felt incredibly exposed. With Sora sprawling out in the back, it left you right next to Jimin, trapped in the intimate, lit bubble of his dashboard, where every shift in your posture was completely visible to his quiet, razor-sharp observation.

Jimin started the engine, the low, throaty purr of the Mazda vibrating right through the soles of your shoes. He shifted into gear with an effortless, practiced flick of his wrist, pulling out of the campus lot and onto the empty, slick roads.

For the first few minutes, the silence inside the car was heavy, filled only with the rhythmic clicking of the turn signal and the soft rush of the heater warming up. You kept your eyes locked on the passenger side window, watching the blurred streetlights smear against the glass, trying desperately to ensure your breathing sounded completely normal.

Sora broke the quiet from the back, her voice muffled against the headrest. "Jimin, please put something on. If I have to think about classical columns or structural integrity for another second, my brain is going to hemorrhage."

"Say no more," Jimin murmured.

He reached over, his silver rings catching the faint glow of the dashboard as his fingers tapped the touchscreen.

He skipped past his usual indie playlists and purposefully dialed into a radio station that was currently blasting a ridiculously high-energy, completely cheesy early-2000s pop song. It was the kind of track that was impossible to take seriously—over-produced, aggressively upbeat, and entirely out of character for Jimin's sleek, sophisticated car.

Sora sat up instantly, her exhaustion vanishing in a split second. "Oh my god. No way."

"Oh, yes way," Jimin grinned, his eyes crinkling at the corners as he checked his blind spot.

Before the first verse even hit, Sora had already rolled up her plastic container of warm soup to use as a makeshift microphone. She leaned forward between the two front seats, screaming the lyrics at the top of her lungs, completely off-key and entirely unbothered. Jimin didn't skip a beat—he joined in on the chorus, throwing his head back, pulling off a series of absurdly dramatic, soulful vocal ad-libs that had no business being delivered with that much passion while navigating a roundabout.

The sheer, ridiculous chaos of it caught you completely off guard.

For the first time in hours, the suffocating weight in your chest cracked. The phantom ache in your thighs, the memory of the acoustic foam walls, and the exhausting, lingering panic of Minho's betrayal were suddenly drowned out by your best friends screaming pop lyrics in a sexy Mazda.

Toxic by Britney Spears. You made a mental note to thank the pop princess for this insane performance.

A genuine, breathless laugh escaped your throat. You leaned your head back against the leather seat, the tension draining from your shoulders as you watched Sora aggressively point her "soup mic" at you, demanding you take the next line. You actually sang along, your voice mixing with theirs, filling the small car with a messy, loud warmth. For those few miles, you weren't a fractured person holding onto a dark, transactional secret just to survive. You were just you, driving home with your friends.

By the time Jimin pulled into the driveway of Sora's apartment building, the song was fading out, replaced by the quiet hum of the idling engine. Sora was out of breath, laughing as she collapsed back into the rear seat, grumbling about how she had definitely ruined her throat.

You let out a soft sigh, a small, residual smile still lingering on your face as you reached for the door handle. "That was... exactly what I needed. Thank you."

"Anytime," Sora exhaled happily from the back, already gathering her canvas bags. "I'm going to run up and unlock the door before my legs cramp again. Don't take forever." She hoisted herself out of the back, leaving the door open behind her as she hurried toward the building's entrance.

You went to unbuckle your seatbelt, but as the car door clicked shut behind Sora, the playful energy in the front seat instantly evaporated.

Jimin didn't turn off the ignition. He just rested his wrist on top of the steering wheel, turning his head slowly to look at you. In the dim, ambient light of the dashboard, his  eyes were completely still, stripped of all the theatrical humor from a moment ago.

He looked at you—really looked at you—with that terrifying, quiet intuition that always made you feel completely transparent. His gaze swept over the slight stiffness in your posture, the heavy way you carried yourself, and the strange, quiet numbness that had settled back into your eyes the exact second the music stopped.

He clocked it instantly. Your aura was entirely different. The frantic, erratic frequency of a girl drowning in a public breakup was gone, replaced by a dense, unreadable gravity.

You froze under his stare, your hand tightening against the fabric of your seatbelt. The silence stretched between you, heavy and loud, making you wonder if he could somehow smell the faint strawberry-mint or the unmistakable scent of another person's skin on you.

Jimin tilted his head, eyes narrowing just a fraction as he assessed the shift. He didn't know what had happened in the art building. He didn't know about the sixty-minute timer or the calculated pact you had just signed with a specific music loving man. But he knew you were hiding something massive.

For a long, agonizing second, you thought he was going to press you. You thought he was going to demand to know where you had been.

Instead, Jimin just let out a very soft, quiet breath through his nose. The tension in his jaw relaxed, and he gave you a small, incredibly gentle nod. He didn't push. He respected you enough to let you keep whatever boundary you were drawing, even if it clearly worried him.

"Let's go inside," he said softly, his voice dropping into a comforting, protective cadence as he finally turned off the engine, plunging the car into shadow. "Before the soup gets cold."

Stepping into Sora's apartment was like stepping directly into her mind. It was very fucking Sora, to a T.

Every square inch of the space reflected her chaotic, hyper-creative architecture major lifestyle. Cardboard mockup models of buildings with tiny, hand-cut windows were stacked precarious on the coffee table, right next to tracing paper, loose charcoal pencils, and thick textbooks on structural load-bearing. Swatches of heavy linen fabric hung over the back of the couch, and a massive, paint-splattered drafting board occupied the corner by the window.

Yet, despite the creative debris, it was incredibly warm and cozy. A soft lamp glowed from the kitchen counter, casting long, shadows across the hardwood floor, and the entire apartment smelled deeply of apple cinnamon—a comforting, sweet scent from a wax warmer plug-in she kept running near the entryway. It felt safe. It felt like a home.

Sora didn't waste any time. She kicked her shoes off into a messy pile by the door, dumped her canvas bags on the nearest chair, and immediately disappeared into the kitchen to grab three ceramic bowls.

Within minutes, the three of you were crowded around her small wooden dining table, the steam from the warm vegetable-and-barley soup rising into the air, fogging up your vision just a little.

"Eat," Sora commanded, pushing a bowl toward you and handing you a heavy metal spoon. "You look like you're about to evaporate, and I refused to let my architecture project claim two victims today."

You took the spoon, the heat of the bowl seeping into your cold palms. Sitting here, listening to the clink of silverware against ceramic and watching Sora aggressively blow on her hot broth, the contrast of where you had been just over an hour ago hit you all over again.

In Jeongguk's studio, the air had been thick with the sterile, artificial scent of strawberry, mint, tobacco and the heavy, electric hum of subwoofers. Here, it was apple cinnamon, homemade soup, and the familiar, grounding presence of the people who actually loved you.

You swallowed a spoonful of the soup, the warmth spreading through your chest, momentarily soothing the raw, exhausted ache in your throat.

Jimin sat directly across from you, eating quietly. He had pulled his hair back, a few loose strands framing his face as he navigated his spoon with characteristic grace. He was participating in Sora's mindless banter about her professor's impossible standards, laughing at her jokes, but his eyes never completely left you. Every time you took a bite, or every time you shifted in your chair—careful not to let your aching thigh muscles tighten up too visibly—Jimin's gaze would subtly track the movement.

He still wasn't pressing you. He was letting you eat in peace, letting you fade into the background of Sora's frantic energy. But the heavy, knowing quiet in his posture remained, a silent reminder that your secret was safe from Sora, but it wasn't entirely invisible.

The clink of your spoon against the ceramic bowl suddenly felt too loud. The warmth of the soup, the heavy scent of apple cinnamon, the sheer, unconditional safety of Sora's kitchen—it was all supposed to comfort you, but instead, it felt like a pressure cooker. The contrast between this gentle room and the clinical devastation you had been running from all day finally cracked your ribs wide open.

A hot, sudden tear spilled over your lower lash line, splashing directly into your bowl.

"Hey," Sora murmured, her voice instantly dropping its frantic, comedic edge. She set her spoon down, her eyes widening with immediate concern. "Hey, what is it?"

"I'm an idiot," you choked out, your voice breaking on the last syllable. You pressed the heels of your hands into your eyes, trying to force the water back, but the dam had completely burst. The exhaustion from the studio, the phantom ache in your muscles, and the absolute humiliation of Minho's betrayal all surged to the surface at once. "I'm a fucking idiot. How did I not see it? How did I let him make me look so stupid?"

Before you could spiral any further, Jimin reached across the small wooden table. His hands were warm, his fingers firm as he gently but unyieldingly pulled your hands away from your face, forcing you to look at him.

"Look at me," Jimin said, his voice dropping into a deep, steady register that demanded your attention. "You are not an idiot."

"I loved him, Jimin..I mean I still do maybe or I dont know—"

"It's okay to still love him. It's okay to not know right now and that is not a flaw," he interrupted softly, his dark eyes fiercely holding yours. "Cheating does not define you. It doesn't mean you were lacking, or blind, or stupid. It defines the person who did it. It is a reflection of his lack of integrity, his cowardice. Not your worth."

Sora abandoned her chair entirely, sliding her seat right next to yours and wrapping a tight, fierce arm around your shoulders. She pulled your head down to her neck, letting you lean into her. "Minnie is right. You didn't do anything wrong except love a guy who didn't deserve it. You didn't do anything wrong by trusting the person who promised to hold your heart."

You let out a ragged, trembling breath, burying your face against Sora's shoulder. The tears were coming freely now, hot and silent, washing away the numb, synthetic armor you had tried so hard to build in the art building.

You've just loved a guy.

The phrase echoed in your mind, heavy and tragic. Because in a world this fragile, sometimes that's your death sentence. Sometimes, pouring your vulnerability into someone else's hands is the very thing that executes you, leaving you to wander around campus like a ghost, looking for any dark corner or dangerous transaction just to make the bleeding stop. You had let Minho kill a part of you, and the grief of that realization was suffocating.

Jimin squeezed your hand, his silver rings pressing into your knuckles, grounding you to the present moment. His expression was incredibly tender, a rare, raw softness rewriting his usually sharp features.

"It feels like an ending right now," Jimin murmured, his voice a soothing, quiet frequency in the amber-lit kitchen. "It feels like you're completely ruined. But you're not. You are going to love again. You are going to blossom again, even if the soil feels completely toxic right now."

"I don't know how to do this," you whispered into the quiet room, the scent of apple cinnamon wrapping around you like a shroud. "I don't know how to feel normal."

"You don't have to know right now," Sora whispered back, resting her cheek against the top of your head, her grip tightening. "We're going to carry it until you can. You just have to breathe."

"You have to allow yourself to feel all the conflicting emotions. You can still love the person that hurt you while aknowledging that's the end. It sucks—yes, but one day the ache will dull, " Jimin's wisdom washed over you. "Imagine how much love you'll carry for the person that will not mess up while holding your heart."

For a long time, the three of you just sat there at the cramped table, the soup growing cold as the conversation drifted into a quiet, deeply comforting space. They didn't ask you to map out your future, and they didn't expect you to be strong. They just sat with you in the wreckage, pulling you back toward the light, entirely unaware that you had already anchored your survival to a guy who sees colors in a soundproof room.

As the quiet, tear-stained safety of Sora's kitchen seemed to freeze in time, the heavy, comforting scent of apple cinnamon and hot broth gradually dissolved, bleeding into the sharp reality of a completely different room across the city.

In another dimly lit apartment—one where the air didn't smell like cinnamon, but carried the dense, bitter tang of strong coffee and the dry metallic scent of heavy sewing machinery—the atmosphere was thick with a completely different kind of chaos.

The floor was a minefield of structural ruin. Bolts of expensive, heavy silks and raw denim were rolled out across the hardwood, pinned down by heavy pattern weights. Discarded measuring tapes coiled like snakes over stacks of fashion lookbooks, and the low couch was practically buried beneath a mountain of unstructured cushions, velvet swatches, and stray tailoring pins that caught the amber glow of a single, industrial floor lamp.

Jeongguk was sitting on the edge of a sturdy cutting table, one leg dangling lazily as he spun a heavy silver ring around his thumb. His jacket was gone, his dark hair falling over his forehead in damp, unruly strands, and his mind was still locked in the deadened, synthetic silence of the soundproof studio. He was tracking the time in his head—the sixty minutes had expired long ago, the contract was technically fulfilled, but the residual weight of your voice breaking under his hands was still vibrating behind his ribs. He had delivered exactly what you needed, yet the quiet in his own chest felt uncomfortably loud.

Purple. Purple moans.

Across the room, standing under the harsh light of a drafting lamp with a pair of heavy fabric shears in hand, Taehyung paused.

Taehyung didn't look up from the collar line he was meticulously pinning into a mannequin, his long fingers working with a fluid, artistic precision that matched Jeongguk's own discipline. But Taehyung's sharp, eccentric intuition was always running in the background. He had been quiet for the last twenty minutes, letting Jeongguk stew in his characteristic, brooding silence.

Without warning, Taehyung snipped a loose thread, tilted his head, and finally cut his eyes over to the cutting table. A slow, knowing smirk crawled up his face.

"You have your 'I got my dick wet face' on," Taehyung remarked smoothly, his deep, baritone voice cutting through the hum of the apartment with zero hesitation.

Jeongguk didn't even blink. He didn't drop his gaze, didn't flinch, and certainly didn't try to deny the accusation. Denial was for people who felt guilty, and Jeongguk didn't do guilt. Instead, a slow, entirely unbothered smirk tugged at the corner of his lips, pulling on his lip piercing with a faint, metallic glint under the industrial lamp. He just kept spinning the silver ring around his thumb, his posture loose, dangerous, and perfectly composed.

He didn't care that Taehyung knew he'd gotten laid. He just had absolutely no intention of uttering your name in this room.

Taehyung set the heavy fabric shears down on the drafting table with a deliberate, metallic clatter. He leaned his hips against the edge, crossing his long arms over his chest, his sharp eyes practically gleaming with amusement as he surveyed Jeongguk's smug silence.

"Care to share with the class?" Taehyung asked, tilting his head. "Because you've been sitting there staring at a blank wall for twenty minutes like you're trying to decode a baseline, and frankly, it's disrupting my creative flow."

"Gentlemen don't kiss and tell," Jeongguk replied smoothly, his deep voice carrying that low, arrogant cadence that usually kept people from pushing him. He shifted his weight on the cutting table, the leather of his boots creaking slightly in the quiet apartment.

Taehyung let out a dry, incredulous scoff, a theatrical roll of his shoulders following it. "You're not a gentleman."

"And you're not a priest," Jeongguk countered instantly, his smirk widening into something sharper, his  eyes locking onto Taehyung's with zero intention of backing down. "So don't come at me for not telling you all my dirty deets. Go back to your mannequin, Kim."

Taehyung threw his head back, letting out a deep, booming laugh that echoed off the high ceiling of the studio apartment. "Jeon, you're so stiff sometimes when it comes to things, I'm sure you could pressure cook an egg inside your ass."

"Fuck off," Jeongguk muttered, though the corner of his mouth twitched up. He picked up a stray wooden pattern weight from the table and tossed it lazily at Taehyung's chest. Taehyung caught it with one hand, completely unbothered, chucking it back onto a pile of velvet cushions.

"I'm serious," Taehyung said, stepping back to examine the silhouette of the denim jacket he was constructing. "You walk around campus looking like you're carrying the weight of the entire engineering block, and then you disappear for an hour and come back looking like you just reset your master clock. It's unnatural."

"It's called efficiency, Kim. You should try it instead of spending four hours draping a single shoulder," Jeongguk fired back, his tone slipping into that easy, rough-edged banter that only existed between the two of them.

"I need perfection. You wouldn't know the difference between a pagoda and epaulet shoulder if it slapped you in the face."

"You say that like it's a bad thing."

"Jeongguk... It's a fashion crime."

They both burst laughing.

They traded a few more sharp stabs—boyish chatter about an upcoming exhibition, Taehyung complaining about the soaring prices of imported silk, and Jeongguk making fun of a horrific avant-garde shoe design Taehyung had sketched the night before.

It really was an unnatural way to wear a shoe.

But as the laughter died down, the atmospheric pressure in the room subtly shifted. Taehyung wiped his hands on a scrap towel and looked over at the master console in the corner, where Jeongguk's mixing gear sat dark.

"So," Taehyung began, his voice dropping into a more grounded, serious register. "What about the recording? The voice memo." He leaned against the drafting table, looking directly at Jeongguk. "Did you give up on finding out who the voice is?"

Jeongguk's thumb stopped spinning the silver ring. His jaw tightened just a fraction, the boyish amusement instantly completely evaporating from his dark eyes. He kept his expression locked down, keeping his thoughts entirely to himself.

He would never give up. Truly.

That recording was his safehouse. Before he found it, his mind had been a hostile, hyper-stimulated territory—a constant, deafening roar of frequencies, internal chaos, and a restless anger that nothing else could quiet. Not the alcohol, not the mindless hooks, not even the brutal, systematic discipline of his own music production. Nothing had helped him manage.

Until he found that little piece of plastic.

It had been an accident. He remembered the exact texture of the afternoon—the air in the art wing had been thick with the smell of turpentine and wet clay. He had been practically tearing a communal desk apart looking for a lost guitar pick, his frustration peaking, when his fingers hit something small and solid. A bright red flash drive, looking completely ridiculous with a frayed, faded koala keychain dangling off the loop.

He had waited. He had left it on the corner of the desk for three days, posted a vague note on the department board, and asked the evening janitors if anyone had been looking for a drive. No one claimed it. It was a ghost asset.

So, he took it as his own. He plugged it into his laptop in the dead of night, expecting to find corrupted project files or boring lecture notes. Instead, he found the raw, unedited voice memo of ultramarine. The second the audio file initialized, the spoken-word poetry had washed through his headphones like a physical wave, grounding his frantic pulse instantly. The voice was an absolute refuge. It possessed a perfect, tragic resonance that managed to isolate all the noise in his head and kill it. He had spent months analyzing the wave file, isolating the breath patterns, trying to find the owner, but the trail had gone entirely cold.

The silence stretched long between the two friends, the hum of the industrial lamp the only sound in the room.

Jeongguk finally broke it, his voice low and raspy as he slid off the cutting table, shoving his tatted hand deep into his front pockets.

"I didn't give up, necessarily," Jeongguk muttered, his eyes flicking toward the dark window, his mind briefly flashing back to the raw, breathless weight of you shivering against his chest in the soundproof room just two hours ago. "But I'm focused on something else right now."

Taehyung arched a perfect eyebrow, a sharp, knowing glint returning to his eyes. "Focused on something else? Since when does Jeon Jeongguk get distracted from a puzzle? Especially one he's been obsessing over."

He pestered because he knew how Jeongguk worked. Taehyung was well aware that if left to his own devices, Jeongguk would gladly drown inside his own head rather than talk. He would let the thoughts calcify until they turned into a physical weight behind his ribs.

But Jeongguk just held his gaze, entirely unbothered. He liked to keep to himself—especially when the "something else" was you.

The truth was, the intense, grounding mystery of that voice memo had subtly begun to recede into the back of his mind over the last few weeks. It had been replaced by a much more visceral, chaotic frequency. He had completely forgotten about the recording now that your relationship with that asshole had finally exploded.

Happy accident.

Breakups were brutal—he'd watched the fallout from a distance, tracking the erratic, fragile panic that had been clinging to you all week—but they were always better than living a lie.

And you and Minho? Both of you had been lying to yourselves from the very start. Minho had lied to you about pretty much everything, weaving a cheap, cowardly narrative to keep you docile. And you? You had lied to yourself just to please a liar, shrinking your own edges and ignoring your instincts just to keep a fraud comfortable.

Jeongguk pulled his hands out of his pockets and walked over to the industrial window, leaning his forearm against the cool glass. From this high up, the campus looked dark, washed out by the persistent mist.

"It's just a thing," Jeongguk said quietly, his voice cutting through the dry, metallic air of the apartment. He thought of the deep, heavy ache you were probably feeling right now, the way you had finished so entirely against him, and the dark, transactional pact you both had signed. "Something that needed to be cleaned up."

Taehyung let out a soft, mocking hum, turning back to his mannequin with a slow shake of his head. "Right. Whatever you say, Jeon. A 'thing.' Just make sure you don't accidentally engineer your own downfall."

"I don't make structural errors," Jeongguk muttered, his eyes still tracked on the dark campus streets below.

"Sure, sure." Taehyung picked up a handful of tailoring pins from the table, expertly sliding them between his lips as he went back to adjusting the denim collar. "But honestly? You should get laid more often. You're actually almost talkative after you finish. It's a nice change from the usual gargoyle routine."

"Eat shit, Tae."

"Just stating the facts," Taehyung murmured around the pins, his long fingers pinning a sharp pleat into the jacket's shoulder.

They drifted back into a lighter rhythm, the tension dropping as they traded a few more insults about each other's work ethics. But Taehyung, as usual, couldn't just leave a quiet room alone. He was a creature of observation, someone who collected campus gossip the way he collected vintage buttons, treating every piece of drama like a texture to be analyzed.

Without looking up from his seam allowance, Taehyung casually smoothed down a layer of heavy fabric.

"Oh, by the way," he said, his voice dropping into that specific, theatrical cadence he used whenever he was about to drop a bomb. "Have you heard?"

Jeongguk didn't move from the window. His forearm remained braced against the glass, his silhouette dark and imposing against the reflection of the industrial floor lamp. He didn't answer, refusing to give Taehyung the satisfaction of an eager reaction, but his ears picked up the shift in frequency anyway.

" The medical and restoration departments are practically in mourning," Taehyung continued, a dangerous, lazy smirk playing on his lips as he stepped back to view the mannequin's silhouette. "Our resident golden boy, Minho, finally got caught with his pants down. Apparently, the whole facade completely crumbled."

Jeongguk didn't move an inch from the window, his forearm still braced against the glass, but every muscle in his back locked up. He let out a low, bored grunt, carefully modulating his tone to sound completely detached.

"Minho? The guy with the immaculate transcript and the punchable face? What did he do, plagiarize a drug?"

Obviously, he knew. He knew the precise structural damage of that blowout, down to the exact shade of devastation in your eyes when you had crossed his threshold. But in front of Taehyung, he had to play dumb. He had to act just interested enough to see exactly how much of the wreckage had made it to the campus grapevines.

Taehyung, for all his eccentricities and sharp gossip-mongering, was a sweetheart at his core. He stopped pinning the denim jacket, his expression softening into something genuinely sympathetic. "No, worse. He was sleeping with some upperclassman in the studios. I heard it was brutal. Honestly, I just hope she's alright, truly. Y/N, I mean."

Taehyung sighed, wiping a hand down his face. "Though, I saw on Sora's close friends story that she's over at her place right now. They're eating soup with Jimin. She looks completely wiped out, but at least she's with them."

Jeongguk's brain snagged on a single phrase, his internal radar instantly spiking. He turned around slowly, leaving the window and leaning back against the sill, his dark eyes narrowing into an aggressive glare.

"Hold on. Sora has you on her close friends?" Jeongguk's voice dropped into a rough, incredulous scratch. "How the fuck? She literally can't stand me. She glares at me like she wants to slice my throat every time we pass in the humanities hall."

Taehyung shrugged, completely unbothered by Jeongguk's sudden intensity as he reached for more pins. "I don't know, man. Both Sora and Y/N followed me on Insta that night after Teaspoon of Sin. I guess I just have a trustworthy face."

There it was. A sharp, ugly twist of irritation flared in the center of Jeongguk's chest.

You followed him? You had actively looked up Kim Taehyung, clicked follow, and let him into a digital circle close enough to see your best friend's private stories—but you hadn't even blinked in Jeongguk's direction online.

You still didn't even follow him back.

The sheer irony of it was maddening. You didn't even care. You hadn't given a single thought to Jeongguk's digital presence, completely freezing him out, even though he was the one who had spent  minutes on his knees in a soundproof room. He was the one who had literally been inside you, learning the exact rhythm that made you lose your mind, delivering exactly what your broken body needed—and yet, to the rest of the world, he didn't even exist on your radar. You had given Taehyung a free pass into your life, while Jeongguk was kept entirely in the dark, restricted to a secret, transactional pact sealed behind a heavy acoustic door.

He knew the shade of your moans and sounds. He knew that cause he's heard that.

Because they were for him. Because he basically delivered them to you.

"Right," Jeongguk muttered, turning his head back toward the dark window so Taehyung wouldn't catch the sudden clench of his jaw. "Trustworthy."

Taehyung went back to talking, but Jeongguk completely tuned him out. His mind was already drifting back to the reality of how you were actually doing.

Taehyung thought you were just a girl recovering from a brutal breakup over a bowl of soup with your friends. Sora and Jimin thought you were fragile, an innocent victim who had just loved the wrong guy. None of them actually knew.

No one on this damn campus knew that you were doing bad—completely, destructively bad. No one knew about the girl who had entered his studio at 10 AM, shivering and crying so hard she couldn't breathe, looking for a place to hide from the debris of her life.

And absolutely no one knew about the girl who had left that same studio in the evening, her muscles aching in a good way, her throat raw from spilling moans and whimpers, and her mind finally quieted after being systematically taken apart and finished off by his hands.

Back in Sora's quiet, apple-cinnamon-scented kitchen, the heavy emotional crying session has finally wound down. You're sitting back in your chair, exhausted but emotionally hollowed out, feeling the comforting weight of Sora's arm around you and Jimin's warm hand still loosely anchoring yours on the table.

Then, your phone buzzes on the wooden table.

j.jk97: interesting how you have time to follow Tae but u couldn't even bother to tap follow back on me before you ran out of my studio.

Your heart dropped like an anchor through your ribs, hitting your stomach with a cold, heavy thud. You stared at the lowercase letters of his handle, the familiar initials striking a violent contrast against the safe, domestic sanctuary of your friends.

You didn't reply.

Your thumb hovered, trembling slightly, before you flipped the device face-down on the table, your pulse hammering against your throat.

Across the city, the silence in the messy designer apartment was just as thick.

Jeongguk didn't throw his phone down when the minutes ticked by without a response. He didn't lock his screen and go back to the conversation with Taehyung. He just sat on the edge of the heavy cutting table, his legs dangling, his  eyes fixed entirely on the glowing interface of his screen.

He was stalking your page. Methodically. Incessantly.

He refreshed the feed, his tatted thumb dragging the screen down over and over, waiting for the little bubble to pop up, waiting for you to reply to him. He didn't care that it was weirdly similar to caring about you, he cared about the silence. But on the third refresh, his sharp eyes caught the shift.

The grid had changed. A specific, rounded icon at the top of your profile was suddenly gone.

You had deleted the highlight with Minho.

Jeongguk's thumb paused on the glass, a slow, predatory spark igniting deep behind his eyes. He didn't need a text message from you to know exactly what you were doing. Right there, under the cover of the evening mist, while sitting in the safety of your best friend's house, you were finally scrubbed clean. You had systematically deleted the digital diary of a man that definitely wasn't for you—wiping away the curated smiles, the fake anniversaries, and the cheap, hollow promises of a fraud.

You were evicting the ghost, pixel by pixel.

A low smirk pulled at the corner of Jeongguk's mouth, tugging on his lip piercing. He didn't wait for your permission. He tapped the text bar and typed out a second message, his dark, heavy thoughts bleeding directly onto the screen.

Back in the kitchen, the phone buzzed a second time against the wood.

j.jk97: let's meet.

You stared at the text, your throat going completely dry. You could feel Jimin's quiet, hyper-observant gaze tracking the sudden stiffness in your shoulders, but your mind was already racing, trapped in the dark gravity of the art building basement.

Why? The question screamed in your head. Why now? Why outside the boundaries of the soundproof room? Why was he breaking the clinical structure of the transaction?

You swallowed hard, your thumb hovering over the glass before you forced a steady breath and typed a single, trembling line into the direct message bar.

y/n_00: The hour ended. We have a deal.

A minute passed. Then two. The low, rhythmic click of Jimin's spoon against his ceramic bowl felt agonizingly loud in the sweet, apple-cinnamon warmth of Sora's kitchen. Beneath the wood table, your fingers tightened around the aluminum edges of your device.

The three dots bloomed, dissolved, and then settled into a single sentence.

j.jk97: i'm parked by the brick pavilion.

You froze.

The brick pavilion. He meant the heavy, covered structure right outside the architecture block back on campus. The realization hit you with a cold jolt: he didn't know where Sora lived.

He had no idea you were across town, tucked away in an apartment that smelled like autumn, trying to piece yourself back together over a bowl of warm broth. He had simply messaged you, assumed you were within his immediate radius, and dropped an ultimatum.

Or so you thought.

If you wanted to see him, you couldn't just slip down a flight of stairs. You would have to actively choose to call a taxi. You would have to slip out of the apartment, book a ride in the dead of night, and travel all the way back to the very campus that had broken you hours ago.

Your chest tightened, a wave of profound hesitation washing over you.

Are you seriously going to do this? The question screamed in your head, sharp and critical. Are you really going to go?

You looked up from the glowing screen. Sora was leaning back in her chair, a soft, sleepy exhaustion washing over her features as she murmured something to Jimin about a morning lecture.

Here, there was safety. There was soup, there were blankets, and there were people who actually valued your heart.

But out there, past the glass of the window, the dark gravity of the art building basement was pulling at the edges of your mind. Jeongguk was sitting in the cold mist, completely unbothered, waiting to see if his influence over you had survived the sixty-minute timer.

Your thumb hovered over the screen, your heart hammering a chaotic, lawless rhythm against your ribs as you stared at his lowercase handle, caught between the warmth of the room and the dangerous, numbing promise of the dark.

You closed your eyes for a brief second, the aluminum edge of your phone digging sharply into your palm.

It was a test. A calculated, silent appraisal of power.

Jeongguk hadn't tracked your location, and he hadn't breached the perimeter of Sora's apartment building. He had simply dropped a pin at the epicenter of your worst day and waited to see if you would gravitate toward it. If you stayed here, wrapped in the apple-cinnamon safety of Sora's kitchen, you kept your dignity. You kept the boundary. You proved that the pact only existed within the sterile, soundproof limits of his studio walls.

But if you called that taxi...

If you spent the money, braved the  fog, and walked back onto that campus just because he typed a four-word sentence, you were giving him something far more dangerous than your body. You were giving him proof.

"Y/N?" Sora's voice drifted over the table, soft and laced with a sleepy, heavy concern. She was looking at you, her brow furrowing slightly as she noticed you hadn't touched your spoon in minutes. "You've been staring at that screen like it's a structural failure. Are you sure you're okay?"

"Yeah," you forced out, the word tasting like ash in your mouth. You slipped the phone face-down onto your thigh, out of sight. "Just... a classmate asking about the project slides for tomorrow. I need to handle it before I forget."

Jimin's eyes narrowed by a fraction of a millimeter. He didn't move, his jaw remaining relaxed, but the sheer intensity of his quiet observation felt like an interrogation. He knew the face you had from a school notification. This wasn't it. He could see the slight, erratic tremor in your hands and the way your breathing had gone entirely shallow. He was practically begging you with his eyes to just speak up, to let him handle whatever was threatening to pull you under again.

But you couldn't. How could you look at Jimin—with his clean, protective loyalty—and tell him that you were secretly mapping out a route back to him?

"I'm just going to go to the bathroom and wash my face," you murmured, pushing back your chair. The legs scraped against the hardwood with a sharp, jarring whine. "My head is just really heavy."

"Take your time, love," Sora said gently, already leaning her head back against the cushion of her chair.

You walked into the narrow hallway, the shadows swallowing you as you stepped out of the amber light of the kitchen. Instead of turning toward the bathroom, you stopped by the coat rack near the front door. Your hands were trembling violently as you pulled up your rideshare app.

Destination: Campus North Gate.

The app whirred, searching for a driver. A little silver car icon popped up on the map, four minutes away. Your thumb hovered over the screen, the weight of the choice pressing down on your chest until you could barely expand your lungs.

This wasn't about sex. This wasn't about the transaction. Jeongguk didn't care about the sixty-minute timer right now, and he certainly hadn't caught a single soft feeling for you. This was a matter of his own ego. He wanted to know if he possessed the slightest bit of influence over you when the physical contact stopped. He wanted to see if you would crawl out of a safe, warm bed and throw yourself into the freezing mist just because he beckoned.

It was humiliating. But he was the only one who got it.

Jeongguk didn't offer comfort. He didn't offer soup or soft words or promises that you would blossom again. But he had been in the wreckage. He knew how to exist in the absolute, frozen center of a storm without breaking. He could handle the sickness of things.

Before your brain could talk you out of it, your thumb pressed the screen.

Ride confirmed.

You quietly grabbed your heavy hoodie from the hook, sliding your arms into the fabric that still faintly carried the sharp, illicit scent of his studio. You didn't look back at the kitchen. You didn't look at Jimin's empty chair. You just turned the deadbolt, the metallic click sounding like a clean fracture, and slipped out into the freezing midnight air.

By the time the car pulled up to the North Gate and idled to a stop, the campus was completely deserted, swallowed by a thick, heavy midnight fog that muffled the sound of the engine.

You paid the driver with numb fingers, stepped out onto the damp pavement, and pulled your hoodie tightly around yourself. The chill cut right through the cotton, but it wasn't the weather that made your teeth chatter. It was the sheer, reckless idiety of what you were doing.

As you rounded the corner toward the brick pavilion, you saw him.

Jeongguk wasn't on his motorcycle. He was leaning against the hood of a heavy, matte-black Mercedes, his arms crossed loosely over his chest. The headlights were cut, but the ambient glow from the pavilion's overhead lamps caught the sharp, dangerous angles of his face and the silver glint of his lip piercing.

The visual hit you like a physical blow to the sternum, forcing a bitter, choked laugh from your throat. It was an insane, twisted parallel. Minho used to wait for you exactly like this. He'd lean against his clean, sensible sedan outside the architecture block, checking his watch, offering that practiced, golden-boy smile the second you walked out of a long critique. Minho had looked like a promise. He had looked like safety.

But Jeongguk? Jeongguk looked like a threat. Standing there in his oversized black hoodie, his hands exposed to the freezing air, his silhouette bleeding into the shadows—he looked like the exact place where promises went to die. Minho had waited for you to give you a curated version of love. Jeongguk had summoned you here just to prove he could.

As your shoes crunched on the gravel, Jeongguk slowly tilted his head up. His dark, unhinged eyes mapped your approach, watching the way you shivered, completely unfazed by the frantic, defensive energy rolling off you.

"You actually came."

There wasn't a trace of warmth in his voice, just a low, dangerous satisfaction.

"Shut up." you snapped, stopping a few feet away from him, your hands shoved so deep into your pockets your knuckles ached. "Don't flatter yourself. I only came because I had to see the look on your face when you realized how pathetic your little power trip is."

A slow, lazy smirk crawled up his face, pulling on his piercing. The familiar, razor-sharp banter—the specific,  frequency that only existed between the two of you—snapped instantly back into place, filling the void between you with a strange, dark electricity.

"Is that why you spent twenty text-less minutes in a taxi?" Jeongguk countered smoothly, stepping away from the car hood. He closed the distance between you with slow, predatory strides until he was towering over you, blocking out the cold wind. "To tell me I'm pathetic? You could've done that from the comfort of whatever cozy bed you ran away from."

"I was eating soup, actually," you fired back, tilting your chin up to look him dead in the eye, refusing to flinch as his shadow enveloped you. "Before you decided to act like a digital stalker. What is this, Jeongguk? The hour ended. The transaction was closed. You don't get to command my presence outside the basement."

"I didn't command anything," he rough-whispered, leaning down just a fraction, his eyes dark and consuming as they locked onto yours. The faint scent of strawberry-mint and cold leather rolled off him, instantly making your head spin. "I dropped a hint. You're the one who booked the ride. You're the one standing in the freezing fog with red eyes, looking at me like I'm the only thing keeping you from collapsing."

"I am not collapsing," you breathed, though your voice trembled just a fraction on the last syllable.

"Sure you aren't," he murmured, his gaze dropping to your mouth before cutting back up to your blown-out pupils. He didn't reach out to touch you sexually. He didn't pull you against him. Instead, he just stared right through your defenses, stripping away the lies you'd been telling yourself all evening. "You deleted the highlight. With Minho."

The name slipped into the air and transformed into a dagger that was aimed at your heart. You didn't dignify the statement with a response.

He had won the gamble, and you both knew it.

He had wanted to see if his influence lived outside the soundproof walls, and you had handed him the proof on a silver platter. It was sickening, a completely toxic realization that you were already hooked on the numbness he provided.

But as you stared at him, the coldness in his jaw seemed to settle into something steady. He didn't mock your vulnerability, and he didn't coddle your grief. He just stood there, a solid, unyielding force in the middle of your ruined world, proving that while everyone else was trying to fix your pieces, he was the only one who could look at the wreckage and not blink.

Jeongguk let out a low, dry breath through his nose, a cloud of pale vapor blooming between you before it was instantly torn apart by the midnight breeze. He didn't look away from your eyes, but his gaze drifted over your shoulder, tracking the way the distant campus streetlamps bled through the heavy, wet fog.

"Look at the lights," he murmured, his deep voice dropping into a raspy, observant cadence. He didn't point, just tilted his chin toward the edge of the pavilion. "The mist tonight. It looks like a shade of burnt orange."

You blinked, the sudden shift from his usual cutting arrogance to an artistic, quiet observation catching you completely off guard. You turned your head slightly, looking at the way the halogen glow from the old architecture building filtered through the thick moisture, turning the air into a dense, rust-colored haze. It looked heavy. It looked suffocating, like a canvas that had been overworked until the colors turned bruised and dirty.

"It looks suffocating," you whispered, the sharp wind biting at your lips. "It looks like the whole campus is under water."

"It's not suffocating," Jeongguk countered smoothly, his eyes cutting back to your face, tracing the sharp line of your jaw in the dim light. "It's just dense. It filters out the background noise. Everything else gets erased when the air gets that heavy. It's practical."

"You find a way to make a toxic fog sound practical," you muttered, a bitter, breathless laugh escaping your throat as you shoved your hands deeper into your hoodie pockets. "Figures."

"I find a way to survive the climate," he said, stepping just a fraction closer, his towering frame cutting off the worst of the wind. "You're the one standing out here pretending you aren't freezing to death just to keep up an attitude."

As if on cue, a violent, uncontrollable shiver wracked your entire body, making your teeth click together. You tried to lock your jaw, tried to force your shoulders to remain rigid and unaffected, but the damp  chill had thoroughly soaked through the thin cotton of your clothes.

Jeongguk's eyes dropped, tracking the slight, erratic tremor in your frame. A tiny, almost imperceptible twitch of irritation crossed his brow, his  expression hardening. He didn't reach out to wrap a hand around your wrist, and he didn't offer you his own heavy hoodie like a conventional gentleman would.

Instead, he turned on his heel, his silver chains clinking sharply as he reached back and pulled open the heavy passenger door of his vehicle.

"Get in," he commanded flatly.

It was a direct order. Typical.

The interior of his car instantly glowed with a dim, moody ambient light, the soft leather seats looking entirely too luxurious for the bleak, gritty courtyard. The low, expensive hum of the climate control was already running, pushing out a wave of dry, enveloping warmth that practically begged you to step inside.

You hesitated for a fraction of a second, your pride warring with the bone-deep exhaustion weighing down your limbs. But the cold was malicious, and the dark gravity of his presence was already a done deal. You pulled your hands out of your pockets and climbed into the high passenger seat, the heavy door closing behind you with a solid, expensive thud that instantly sealed out the rest of the world.

The interior of the Mercedes smelled deeply of him—leather, expensive musk, and that dark, illicit hint of strawberry-mint tobacco.

Jeongguk walked around the hood, his movements fluid and unhurried as he opened the driver's side door and slid into the cockpit. He didn't look at you right away. He just rested his forearms against the steering wheel, his long fingers tapping a slow, rhythmic pattern against the leather.

Sitting there in the  warmth, the realization hit you all over again, settling into your chest like concrete.

He was so violently different from Minho.

The contrast wasn't just in the cars they drove—Minho's sensible, pristine sedan versus Jeongguk's aggressive, blacked-out Mercedes. It was in the very fabric of how they existed in your space. Minho's car had always felt like a stage. When you sat in Minho's passenger seat, there was an unwritten expectation to perform. You had to look a certain way, smile at his jokes, ask about his day, and carefully maintain the clean, perfect image he had designed for the two of you. Minho required your energy to keep his own ego inflated.

But Jeongguk? Jeongguk didn't demand a single thing from you.

He didn't ask you how you were doing, he didn't expect you to be polite, and he didn't need you to put on a face. In his car, you could be entirely ruined. You could sit in the dark, bleeding your silent panic into the expensive leather, and he wouldn't look at you with pity or discomfort. Minho had loved you for the lie you were living; Jeongguk was the only one who seemed entirely comfortable with the truth of your disaster.

"You're staring," Jeongguk murmured, not even turning his head to look at you. His  eyes were fixed on the windshield, watching the burnt orange fog roll against the glass.

"I'm not staring," you lied instantly, your tone automatically snapping back into that bratty, defensive frequency. You shifted in the leather seat, crossing your arms tightly over your chest. "I'm just trying to figure out why someone who claims to be entirely transactional is currently running up his gas mileage to sit in a parking lot with me."

"I told you," he said, a faint, lazy smirk tugging at his lip piercing. "I wanted to see if you'd come. And you did."

"Because I'm an idiot," you muttered, cutting your eyes back toward the side window. The glass was entirely fogged up now, thick condensation turning the streetlamps outside into smeared, bleeding halos of rust. "A literal, textbook masochist. I should be in bed right now. I was actually warm."

"You were freezing when you walked up to my car," Jeongguk countered smoothly, his tone low and even as he shifted his weight. The dark leather of the driver's seat creaked beneath him, a heavy, expensive sound that filled the quiet cockpit. He didn't sound triumphant or smug; he just stated it like a cold, architectural fact. "Your teeth were chattering."

"That was from anger, not the cold."

"Sure." He finally turned his head, his dark, sharp gaze dropping down to watch the way your hands were still tightly clenched against your ribs. "That's why your shoulders are still up to your ears."

Before you could fire back another sharp, bratty retort, Jeongguk reached out. His finger clicked a button on the sleek console, and the low hum of the climate control shifted, a steady, intentional stream of hot air blowing directly into the passenger footwell, melting the chill right out of your damp shoes.

The immediate, enveloping warmth made the defensive bite in your throat dissolve before you could stop it. You let out a quiet, defeated breath, your shoulders finally dropping an inch.

The silence that settled over the car wasn't like the heavy, clinical vacuum of the soundproof studio. It felt different—vaguely nostalgic, pulling your mind back to weeks  ago, long before the chaotic breakdown and the dark, transactional pact you'd signed earlier today.

There had been a day on the far edge of the campus benches, where the two of you had just sat in the talked.

No performance, no masks. Just two people trading rough, cynical observations about nothings. About colors. About his weekends when he was 10. About your car revving maroon top.

"The highlight," you breathed softly into the dark, the admission slipping out before your brain could build the wall back up. "I deleted it because looking at it made me feel like I was actively participating in a lie. I just... I couldn't look at his face anymore."

Jeongguk stopped tapping his thumb against the leather steering wheel. He didn't offer a shallow platitude, and he didn't tell you it was going to be okay. He despised Minho too much for fake sympathy, and he respected your intelligence too much to feed you cheap comfort.

"Good," he said, his deep baritone dropping into a raw, raspy resonance that felt entirely too close in the violet shadows of the dashboard. He leaned his elbow on the center console, turning his upper body toward you. "He didn't deserve the real estate on your page anyway. You're better off empty."

"It feels heavy," you whispered, your voice cracking just a fraction as you stared at the glowing  lights of the dashboard. "Being empty."

Jeongguk didn't answer right away. He reached out, his hand moving with a slow, deliberate discipline that gave you every opportunity to pull back, to demand the clinical boundaries of your deal. But you didn't move. His thumb, slightly rough and smelling faintly of tobacco and cold metal, hooked gently under your chin, tilting your face up until you had no choice but to look into his unhinged, deep eyes.

He just held you there, his grip steady and unyielding, anchoring you in the middle of your ruined world.

"I told you," Jeongguk murmured, his thumb brushing against the line of your jaw, his gaze mapping out the raw, exhausted reality of your face. "The air is dense tonight. It filters out the noise. Let it be empty for a while. I can handle the weight."

He took his hand back slowly, his thumb trailing off your skin with a lingering, heavy drag that left a patch of intense warmth behind. He slid back into his side of the cockpit, his large frame relaxing against the leather as he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his lighter.

He didn't spark it. He just flipped the heavy metal casing open and closed, a steady, rhythmic click-snap filling the quiet  interior.

"So," Jeongguk began, his voice dropping a register, sounding casually detached but carrying that sharp, engineering focus that noticed everything. "Sora and Jimin. They're babysitting you through this?"

You swallowed the small lump in your throat, leaning your head back against the headrest, your eyes tracking the small orange flame as he finally flicked the lighter alive for a brief second before snapping it shut. "They're not babysitting me. They're just... being good friends. They care."

"Right. Friends," he echoed, a dry, cynical tilt to his mouth. He knew exactly what Jimin's protective frequency looked like, and he knew how much your circle wanted to shelter you from the ugly parts of this breakup. But Jeongguk also knew you had run straight out of that shelter the moment he gave you a destination. "They think you're sleeping in the bathroom right now or what?"

"They think I'm clearing my head," you muttered, cutting your eyes over to him, the bratty edge returning to your voice just to cover up the sudden vulnerability. "Which I was. Until you decided to drag me out into a parking lot to analyze my social media habits."

Jeongguk let out a low, rough chuckle that vibrated deep in his chest. He stopped flipping the lighter, sliding it back into his pocket as he leaned his head back against his seat, turning his face to look at you in the dim, moody light. His eyes narrowed slightly, a sudden, wicked spark dancing behind his pupils—the exact, unhinged look he got right before he dismantled your composure.

"You know," he murmured, his lip piercing catching a glint of violet as a slow, dangerous smirk stretched across his face. "Taehyung was talking a lot of shit earlier about how immaculate and proper you and Minho used to be. Said the two of you looked like a goddamn university brochure."

You frowned, your chest tightening slightly at the mention of the ghost you had just deleted. "What's your point, Jeongguk?"

"I'm just saying, as bad as he was for you, you put up quite the reputation."

"So...?"

Jeongguk leaned in just an inch closer, his gaze dropping to the leather console between you before lifting back up to lock onto yours with absolute amusement.

"So," he rough-whispered, the cadence of his voice turning entirely dark and provocative. "Is it real you've never fucked in the car?"