Jimin
Days on trial: 72
I'd thought about this occasion too many times to recount; in the mornings when I'd wake up with Chloe's hair tickling my chin, on long evenings together when neither one of us wanted to stop talking nonsense and during the days when I couldn't see her at all. She consumed my thoughts endlessly and yet I was never exhausted of it, never exhausted of her.
We were on the deck of a little boat just off the shore of Jeju, drying off from the midnight dive I'd insisted we should take. I'd always been of the opinion that New Year's kisses were dumb, and I'd made up for the lack of one by relentlessly kissing her once we'd returned to the boat.
In all fairness, I'd done a lot more than just that to make up for it in the last couple of hours.
And so now we sat snuggled up, watching the tide ebb and flow around our small little boat, as if we were the only two people left on the earth. The sun would be rising soon, and that was the real main event of our new year. That was when the magic happened.
"You remember when we first met?" I hummed as she nuzzled into me, the endless black sky above us magnifying just how tiny and insignificant we really were. Like grains of sand on the beach that we were floating a short distance from, we were lost amongst billions of people and yet we'd still managed to find one another.
"Is this a test?" She pressed her lips against the hollow of my neck, and even though I knew for a fact that the sky was empty, it felt like I was seeing the brightest fireworks.
"You're already failing," I joked, pulling her in tighter, protecting her from the early morning chill blowing across the ocean.
"Oh, I do apologise, Print Master Park," Chloe ribbed right back, passing her test with flying colours.
It was hard to believe that we'd ended up in this position when we looked back - although also not at all. Not really.
━━━━━━━━
There was a reason why Jimin was strictly prohibited from answering the phone in the office at the end of the warehouse he spent his days in. Well, actually, there were a few.
The first was that he was too busy. He didn't need the distractions.
The second was because of that one time he accidentally left it off the hook for three days straight and lost the business a deal worth ₩40million.
The third, and probably most important reason, was due to his incredible knack of being a real asshole over the phone.
"We pay good money to get the Gazette out at a specific time every single day!"
"Yeah, and a new client paid us better, little miss Gazette," he'd shrugged, and if she'd have come to the office and seen him in the flesh, she would have seen his appled cheeks and boyish grin, and maybe she wouldn't have taken it quite so personally. "We're a business, we operate as such. Comprende?"
"Compr-" she scoffed down the line, and Jimin thought she sounded like a fucking nightmare. "I want to talk to your supervisor."
"No can do."
"Why?"
"He doesn't want to talk to you."
Annie had watched the whole interaction unfold with great intrigue. She'd never seen Chloe so rattled, not even after green peace protestors had chained themselves to the office door to object to the practice of print media. Something about too many trees being cut down. Namjoon was, unsurprisingly, the one who managed to negotiate with them.
