Falling For My Enemy ⚠️ [ On Hiatus]

5

Jimin pov.

I didn't know when Jungkook and I became rivals.

Okay, that was a lie.

It's funny how the mind worked. I couldn't remember what I had for lunch three days ago, but I had a very distinct memory of the day I first met the Jeon boys-polar opposites in personality, as well as their impending roles in my life-one destined to be my best friend and the other my nemesis.

Although they lived around the corner from me, we met on the beach. I was only nine years old at the time. My mother started talking to their family first. They were new in town, moved here from Busan.

Theoretically, one would think I would've gravitated toward Jungkook since he was my age, doomed to be in the same class for the rest of our school years. Our mothers even remarked on it. But the way things are supposed to work out and the way they actually do are often two very different things.

I remembered noticing Jungkook in the water. Even then, he was a veritable fish. He flopped around, dove, and splashed in the waves like a dolphin, while Taehyung and I played in the sand. Eventually, the ninety-degree heat and the blazing sun took their toll, and I needed to cool off, so I ventured into the water cautiously, dipping down in a soft swell, allowing the saltwater to cool me.

But before I could run back out of the surf, a hand caught my leg. I looked back into Jungkook's smiling face. He was floating on his red boogie board with a crooked smile. His dark hair was a little lighter and a little longer back then. It always hung in his eyes, and I found myself continually wanting to brush it away.

The sun glistened off his boyish frame, yet to be broadened and muscled from puberty and years of swimming. He had a small smattering of freckles just over his nose. Ones I knew only cropped up in the summer. But it was his eyes that transfixed me, even then-all that vast brown.

I hadn't seen the wave coming. It crashed down over me just as Jungkook pushed off, propelled by the momentum on his board, riding the wave, while I practically drowned in it.

The undertow sucked me down until I rolled over the sand, the waves tumbling my body like a piece of shale. When I finally surfaced, gasping for air, I pushed the hair out of my face, coughing and choking up salty water. My belly burned from its brutal encounter with sand and shells. My throat was raw, my skin red, and when I looked up at Jungkook, lying peacefully on the sand, still on his board, blissful after his ride on the waves, I frowned. He glanced back at me and laughed.

LAUGHED!

Now, I was no expert at nine, but I was pretty sure laughing when someone nearly lost their life because of you was not the proper way to make friends. Call me crazy.

"You were supposed to swim," he said.

Swim-as if it were that simple.

Yeah, I wanted to say, sure. Your eyes tranquilized me, but my little nine-year-old brain was supposed to be cognizant enough to see the wave coming (from the eyes in the back of my head I didn't know I had). Right.

I stared daggers at him. It was Taehyung who ran to my side and saved me. He grabbed my hand and asked if I was okay, then offered me some of his sports drink and Swedish Fish. And I never forgot it.

It was the first and last time Jeon Jungkook would ensnare me.

With the memory of that day fresh in my mind, I headed to my desk, marveling at how our rivalry only grew from there. Grabbing my laptop, I carried it over to my bed, where I propped myself up against my upholstered headboard with a bunch of pillows and stretched my legs out in front of me.