Really, Baby (I Will Be Just Fine)

6

A little birdie named Yoongi tells me you held up the entire restaurant at our work the other day because you were too busy romancing Taehyung.”

Hoseok is in the middle of cleaning the kiddie pool when Jimin casually brings it up, holding his rescue tube in his lap and watching Hoseok struggle to grab a piece of what looks like a diaper at the opposite end, balancing carefully on the ledge.

“God, did Yoongi also say I turned into Fabio and tore my shirt open?” Hoseok says, huffing and shaking his head unbelievably. Yoongi told Jimin everything. “Okay first of all, you’re using the ‘little bird’ idiom wrong. And second, I was not romancing anyone. I was kindly discussing the mixup of my order with someone that so happened to be Taehyung.”

“Idiom or not, you still held up the line talking to Tae,” Jimin says, wriggling his eyebrows above his sunglasses suggestively. “You, Jung Hoseok, who is constantly keeping us in-line and making sure we aren’t eating glue or rudely staring at people in public.”

Jimin has a point, but Hoseok really doesn’t have an explanation for holding up the line (in his defense, why had they all snuck up on him so quietly?). So what if it was shameless flirting? It didn’t mean much of anything, and maybe Taehyung was just as talkative as him. There’s no harm in two talkative people having small talk - none at all - and he certainly doesn’t count the time during freshman year of college where he’d made out with a random stranger at a party after discussing the best lightbulb brands to use in bedrooms. Alcohol was the reason small talk had happened between them in the first place.

As Jimin sits perched up on the tall lifeguard chair, Hoseok takes a moment to examine his friend. He had always found it funny that Jimin, the one with the best body out of everyone in their circle of friends, was not a lifeguard and instead worked at a burger place that sold greasy foods and sugary drinks. And now, as Jimin sits in Hoseok’s seat with his rescue tube slung over his bare shoulder, sunglasses perched over the bridge of his nose with a layer of sunscreen coating his face (he doesn’t understand this, considering it’s cloudy out today), Hoseok can’t find one reason as to why Jimin wouldn’t want to be a lifeguard and join them at work.

“He was trying to give me fries, and you know I don’t eat those,” Hoseok shrugs, stepping off the ledge and emptying the contents on the cleaning net over the trashcan. He glances around carefully. “Plus, you know I’m working on my body.”

“But you did eat them.”

“Well, I’d be a dick if I didn’t accept the free fries.”

“You deny free fries from me all the time,” Jimin deadpans.

“That’s because I can be a dick to you and not feel too bad about it.”