BABY MAMA | pjm

LIII

ACT XI | SCENE LIII

❝MANILA ENVELOPE❞

[five years earlier]
august 2012

HER NAIL SCRATCHED against the wood of the old coffee table in her small apartment. jangmi focused on the movement and not on the man across from her. she kept telling herself that it would be dumbest thing she would do to cry in front of him. somewhere in the back of her mind, she knew how this was going to end. but she hoped against hope that she was wrong. yet she braced herself for the worst.

her eyes strayed to the manila envelope on the coffee table. the one she'd only just gotten that morning from the dance company. she hadn't opened it, seeing that jimin suddenly showed up after weeks of zero communication. forcing herself to look up, she met his intense gaze. neither of them had said anything in nearly ten minutes. just sat there on the floor of her tiny apartment, looking at anything but each other.

"where have you been?" her voice was barely audible. were it not for the stark yet awkward silence of the room, he wouldn't have heard her. "seoul." he answered plainly. her gaze was back on the bit of the table she was compulsively scratching. "you've been avoiding me." it wasn't a question and she didn't phrase it as one. she scratched the wood more viciously, picking up specks of wood in her fingernail. "why?" she examined the nail, picking at the wooden motes now buried in her skin.

she was unnervingly calm, the only hint at her discomfort was the constant scratching which served as a form of self harm, seeing that the miniscule pieces of wood, painful and difficult to remove, kept lodging in her index finger. jimin watched her action, wanting to stop her but resisting the urge. instead he kept his visage impassive though he twisted his rings up his fingers, hiding the action from her line of vision.

"is there really a need for me to answer that?" he said after a brief moment of harsh silence. she stopped scratching, fixing him with the coldest glare he'd ever received from her - from anyone really. "yes, jimin. there is." the scratching became more aggressive, scaring him a bit.

"when a guy starts acting like his girlfriend doesn't exist out of the blue, doesn't she deserve an explanation when he suddenly deems it fit to see her?" her tone was angry. his eyes widened when he saw her nail break. it didn't stop her though as she continued to scrape the wood. "or are we even still that?" she glanced at him.

"you just disappeared without a word for twenty seven days. not a call, not a text, not even a glimpse of you. i was worried out of my mind, thinking something had happened at first. i was only able to confirm you weren't dead because of taehyung. and you sit there and ask if there's really any need for you to answer my question." she was bleeding from the scratching, more spelks sticking out of her skin. he had to force himself not to look down to resist the urge of grabbing her hand. "i had things to do." he supplied, looking her in the eye. "you had things to do?" a dry, humorless laugh left her mouth.

"look jimin, if you want to break up with me, just be straight with me and tell me. don't be a coward and hide away for a month. don't tell me shit like you had things to do. just say you don't want to be with me anymore." her voice cracked on a tiny sob at the end. when he looked at her again, he saw that her eyes were glossy with unshed tears. "the only thing i'm asking for is the honesty i always gave you. a little straightforwardness is all i want right now. not your roundabout, one line replies." she resumed her scrattling of the wooden table.

"you want honesty?" he straightened his back, trying to organise the words in his head before he said them. "i've decided to grow up. and that means shirking childish behaviours and cleansing myself of puerile distractions. i can't be a man if i keep thinking like a boy." he stated cleanly. he barely stopped himself from flinching at the way her finger seemed to slip down the wood, picking up a large splinter in her skin in the process. she moved her bloody finger to her chest, staining her mustard yellow t-shirt with a dark red smudge. "am i one of those puerile distractions?"