Bangtan's Baby | 18+

sixteen✧༺here comes spring

Jin's POV

I know I can be cruel. I know someone like Li doesn't deserve it.

I wasn't kind to her to begin with, but I had started to be. Although I ensured the distance between us never closed, I could feel her chipping away at the sculpture I had become.

I tried to keep myself closed off, tried to keep her at arms distance, but it was becoming impossible.

I thought about her more often than not, and she began to take up space in my mind, just like Gyeo did—just like Gyeo still does.

It feels different with Li. It could be the distance, it could be the dynamic, but it could simply be her.

She's not Gyeo, although it would be easier if she were. I could push her aside and keep the potential pain away, but she's kind. She's sweet enough that I can feel it in my teeth, sweet enough that when I kiss her, I can feel it on my tongue, lingering hours after she's gone. Everything about her is sweet enough to make me sick, and still, I want more. The thought itself makes me sick.

I was already off-putting to her, but I could tell she noticed the difference after Jimin talked to me and the others, telling us she wanted more. I started being rougher, harsher. When my words began to cut deeper. I needed to keep her away, needed to stop myself from completely opening myself up to her. I needed to protect myself.

It was a few days of difference before we went to pick her up from work, all of us piled in the car with no extra seats available for her. I pulled her on my lap and used my arms as her seatbelt. I remember how she was stiff until she wasn't, how her body melted against mine.

I didn't realize how much I needed her that close until I didn't want to let her go.

She refused to leave me, and every part of me ached not to let her, but I pushed my facade to the surface, and I told her a different story. She left quickly. I wish I hadn't done that. I wish I had stayed with her in the car, held her on my lap, and kissed her for the first time when it was just the two of us.

And it was different, the two of us in my room, when she told me she wanted me.

"They can give you rough," I told her.

She said, "But they can't give me you."

Maybe she was lying, maybe me admitting my want for her was to edge her pleasure on, but I was too weak to deny myself her lips anymore.

I hadn't kissed anyone since Gyeo. I'm glad it was Li.

♡

I enter the house the morning after I denied wanting a relationship with her at the breakfast table. I stayed at a hotel overnight, laid on the sheets, and didn't sleep. I thought about her.

The house is quiet. I hoped it would be. I didn't want to talk to anyone. I can grab a change of clothes and head to work; I'll deal with my friends there.

The stairs creak beneath me, and I think I join them. It feels like I do, the deepest parts of me creaking and saying things I never meant for them to say.

"I think I like her," I told Jimin. Maybe I shouldn't have.

Li doesn't deserve someone like me. She deserves someone like Jimin and the others, and now she has them. She has six other people to accommodate and love her; she'll be better off without me.

Her words bouncing around in my head tell me otherwise, but I push them aside, blanketing them with snow.

When I open my bedroom door, said snow starts to melt. It's a strange feeling, sending goosebumps to rise along my skin.