Enveloped with Love! (Taekook)

CHAPTER XXI

AN: Pay attention to time stamps to avoid confusion. 

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June 9th, 2022 - Seoul - Taehyung's residence - 11:42 pm

The past three weeks had been the worst that Taehyung had faced. He had had no contact with J whatsoever after his last letter to him and he was panicking. He had no clue why J would just ghost him like that out of the blue when all was going so well with them.

It had hit him like bricks to not have his letters come in. All these months of communicating back and forth had made Taehyung take them for granted and now that they had stopped, he felt as if a piece of him was missing.

He felt physically sick to the point that he was back to how he was before J's letters even made an appearance in his life. Everything felt bland, everything felt numb and he just wanted the feeling back when J was a major part of his life.

No matter how much time he tried to put in his work, or how much time he spent at the cafe or met up with Jimin and Yoongi, nothing made him feel alive the way J made him feel. All of his efforts to keep himself busy were falling apart and try as he might, he couldn't avoid the pain in his heart.

Sure, at the beginning Taehyung was just writing to him since it would be rude to just stop but now as he lies in his bed with eyes that look dead and tears that won't stop, he realizes that maybe he miscalculated how much he needed J in his life. He realized he was living in denial and it took J to stop writing to him to understand that what he felt for him was real.

He didn't know about J but Taehyung needed him as he needed oxygen. As he needed water to survive. He felt as if he was drowning in the ocean of sorrow and only J has the power to pull him out to get that one breath of life. But as days carry on, with no letter from J, he couldn't think of any reason why he would stop writing to him.

Has his last letter offended J somehow? In hindsight, Taehyung thinks maybe going on and on about how handsome that man outside the cafe was not the nicest thing to do. But he couldn't help it. He always told J about everything that happened in his life no matter how small. This in comparison was relatively big. He hadn't been able to stop thinking about the handsome stranger and at the same time be distraught that J was ignoring him.

At first, he had thought that J would be caught up in something or maybe had to leave Seoul for sometime. But after three weeks of absolute silence from J, Taehyung couldn't help but worry that something was terribly wrong.

J was not this person. He would not do this to Taehyung. He was someone who had taken time out of his life to write to Taehyung and even pretended to be Jae-Hyun just so Taehyung would get some closure. J had come into his life like a knight in shining armor saving him from the confines of his own mind. He had healed his broken heart that nobody was able to do before. Like a sly little thief, J had come into his life, given him a sliver of happiness and just as silently left but not without taking a piece of Taehyung's heart with him.

Time away from J and without his letters to keep him company in his life, Taehyung was forced to admit that J had become so much more to him in these months. It was as if J was that one thing that kept him rooted to his life and he came to the realization that if not for J, he had absolutely nothing.

All this while he had thought that he wasn't ready to open his heart to anyone. He had thought that once he was ready, he would jump into the dating scene again with a bang and meet someone, fall in love and all that jazz. But while he was busy writing to the stranger who wasn't that anymore, he had failed to notice that he had already opened his heart to him. Already barred every layer of himself and quite literally handed J the power to destroy him from within.