It's a heartbeat

Chapter 5 | Dance for me

There's something comforting in waking up completely alone.

In his own bedroom, cocooned in his own super-heroes blanket with a touch of scent that connects only to him –to the cologne he wears every single day, soft enough for his nostrils to not start burning. No ghostly traces of smeared make-up on his pillowcases; no crumpled tissues used to clean the thick liquid mess done the night before tossed at the foot of the bed; no corporeal heat coming from the other portion of the mattress of a queen-size bed that never embraced any other body except his own.

There's something comforting, to Jungkook, in greeting a new day all by himself.

Staying a little longer in here and enjoying the warmth of the sheets that wrap him from the waist down, shivers running through his thighs for the cotton fabric that grazes against his skin as he stretches his bare legs. The bleary eyelids still shut, basking in a torpor that seems to drag him once again in a deep slumber; cracking his eyes open and sink in a reality made of feeble light that bathes his room, made even smaller by the myriad of belongings scattered in a jumble throughout the place (his mother insists he should be less lazy and tidy up; but on a closer look, it's not a matter of laziness: the fact is that he buys so many things he doesn't know where to put them anymore -trinkets, that's how Jimin calls them. For him, instead, they're just a physical and palpable representation of himself, describing him in such an intimate way that only his best friend and his mom had the chance to see them); enjoying the silence, scratched by the traffic noise of Seoul waking up, or the clanging of pots and pans being banged together coming from the apartment next his own.

Oh, of course, it's not unusual for him the eventuality of snapping back to reality in a room that isn't his own. But his body got used to adapt to environments that differ from his small flat a few blocks away from KNU, and some mechanic gestures engraved in the folds of his brain to the point that it doesn't worry anymore if its proprietor finds himself amidst a strangers' sheets for a handful of seconds longer than usual before leaving.

Because it feels like Jungkook is programmed to leave -as if it was a characteristic of his DNA.

In spite of appearance and the long list of girls and women he shared some pleasant hours (and stuttered breaths and squelched moans) with, he doesn't know what it means to remain beside someone till the sun creeps over the horizon: after enjoying the sheer beauty of their slicked bodies melting with one another –after pulling himself out of the inebriating dizziness of the orgasm that bubbles up in every inch of him, after the caresses and words have lost their initial electricity, he recollects his clothes and goes back home -with a pair of effulgent eyes intensely staring at him until he disappears behind the door.

Hoseok told him he should try to stay at least once: let himself go, fall asleep with his heart still dragging along the ribcage for the sex session he just participated in, and see what happens the morning after. To give it a shot with someone he's been dating for, like, three months now (because if things progressed so well and for so long, for someone like him, then it must mean that she's the right one); but until today, nobody was worth enough for him to try to stay.

Jungkook never stays long enough to permit that something so profound and intimate could happen.

He sometimes ponders over this eventuality, about welcoming a new day in the company of someone who isn't his best friend or a classmate -waking up and contemplating a special someone's body curled up under the sheets, wondering in which way all his muscles and nerves could tense up before this brand-new sight. And... although it's quiet hard to imagine how we could react in a situation we never faced before -how we could deal with an experience that our brain never had the chance to metabolize and catalogue- the mild queasiness that starts brewing in his stomach at the mere fantasy taking shape in the back of his mind is enough to make him comprehend that he'd be utterly terrified.