Bond Made in Hell || A TAEJIN STORY || Arranged Marriage

33

Taehyung

It's nearly eleven o' clock when I come back home from office. The stocks market is suffering these days, and I've been working extra hard to make sure my employees don't fall short of their promised salaries. It's a tough job to single-handedly manage a huge conglomerate such as mine, not dirt-easy and typically 'chaebol' like some people seem to think.

I expect Jin to already have had his dinner and retired to bed when I return, but surprisingly, he's curled up on the couch, doing absolutely nothing.

I stop at the doorway, looking quietly at him. He's wearing his blue patterned night-suit, the one he brought from his house, and one I've always thought dead cute. He looks like he's had a hard time getting to sleep- there are dark circles under his eyes and he looks visibly tired. There's a strange look in his eyes...not exactly sad, but reflective. I don't know why I'm standing there and staring at him for so long, but somehow, I just can't get my eyes to tear away.

Jin looks up that moment, and my breath hitches slightly as his large brown eyes meet mine. He blinks his eyes open, and the corners of his lips tug into a small, weary smile. 'Good evening.'

I'm even more astonished than I could possibly be, because so far, all I've gotten from him when I've come back home in the evenings is a brief, cold look and a 'hey' at most. Though there's no one other than me to blame for that, and I know it.

Jisoo left for Jennie's place a day ago, saying she'd be back in time before her wedding. She said they were going to have to go shopping together and a thousand and one other things, but I'm not a fool. I don't know what sort of stuff they're going to get up to once they're together at Jennie's, but I do have a rough idea.

I was expecting and looking forward to more long, dreary days of leaving for work, slogging all day long and returning late at night to a near-empty house and solitary dinners, then spending a lonely, sleepless and restless night before going back to work next day. But what I didn't expect was this.

'How was your day?' Jin continues, though his eyes don't quite meet mine as I draw near the sofa.

'It was okay,' I reply, still wondering why he's making any effort to talk.

I mean, it's not like I ever did, either.

I won't deny, there have been days when I've gone to bed and spent a couple hours awake thinking about.....the kiss. Our kiss. It might have been purely accidental. To Jin, anyway. But for me.....the kiss...it seemed special. It seemed out of the ordinary. I had kissed quite a few people in my whole life, but none of them had given me the excitement and the pleasure that I had gotten out of that kiss. That was the kind of kiss people didn't experience very much in their lives. The one that made your skin tingle and your heart thump wildly under your chest.

I am not quick to jump to conclusions, however. There could be many reasons I had reacted that way to a simple kiss: maybe because I had not kissed another man or woman in several months, maybe because I had forgotten what it felt like. Maybe it was purely sexual, the feeling I had gotten. And I was determined to push it away at all costs, and act the same way as I had before.

Because as he had said, we were strangers, weren't we?

And then there was always the indescribable feeling of guilt I got in the middle of my gut whenever I caught sight of him- the guilt of having treated him the way I did in the early days of our marriage. Our behaviour towards each other had improved somewhat, indeed; but it was not enough, not even close, to erase the guilt I kept hidden away in my heart and did not allow to show on my face. I had apologized to him a long time ago, but I did not know if he knew I meant it, and I was not sure I meant it myself. Besides, who was I to assume he would accept my apology? It was so very easy for him to refuse it: I was the one who made things that easy for him, after all.