Our Rain Soaked Bodies | YOONJIN

6. BENEATH THE SKIN

LATELY, THE ONLY thing Seokjin seems to be knowing, without any doubt, is that Min Yoongi is an enigma.

He knows Yoongi looks as brash as someone you needed to think a second time about approaching him. It was something in his gaze or the way he carries his body that can bore nervousness into anyone. It nerved Seokjin too, by the pub counter, on the first talk they had in a bar, he had him needing to put up a barrier in between them just not to feel trapped in Yoongi's sharp gaze. Therefore Seokjin thought he could read him like an open book. An arrogant, alabaster cold and a blatant player who would leave his bed in the morning as quick as he shags; Yoongi was an overt piece—Seokjin thought of him—until he wasn't.

He doesn't know when he started to catch up on his utterly inaccurate assumptions but as the nights spent at Yoongi's place increase, Seokjin had to revert back to his initial impression and doubt about everything he classified Yoongi as. Suddenly he found himself to be unable to explain how someone like Yoongi could have the skin is as warm as a furnace and as soft as silk. He can't explain how someone like Yoongi's eyelashes could come down to shade his irises in the way that's almost shy and endearing. He just can't explain Min Yoongi as for all the thing Seokjin thought he would never be.

He was a living contradiction. And as for the person who likes to keep things clean white or black, the existence of Yoongi was throwing Seokjin off the reel in every waking moment.

Then from there, everything went downhill.

Once he knew, his frustration and fascination toward Yoongi morphed together somehow and turned into something anew and it landed in between of infatuation and fondness. Seokjin only realized it when he was softly tracing Yoongi's cheekbone and hooking fallen strands behind his ear in his own half-awake haze without a second thought and wanted to stay like that little bit more.

It's been long awhile since Seokjin has properly fallen in love and then out of it to the point he just gave up on the thought of finding his one true and being single has even stopped bothering him for a while. He has been doing just fine holding his own hands, slapping his own butt and whispering affection in his own ears but when Yoongi kisses him on the soft skin in between his shoulder blades, traces his fingers along the bumps on his spine and presses his hand in the lee of his neck, it is so hard for Seokjin to pretend that his heart does not flutter.

[I love you.]

Seokjin closes his eyes; he felt this sensation before—at the top climax of a roller coaster, dangling as he waits for the drop, an empty air under him and uncertain where the rail would jolt him back up. He is scared.

He got scared shitless when Yoongi gasped those words. In the heat of the moment, it might have been just nonsense slipped out in between sex and orgasm. But it was enough to frighten Seokjin that in cockcrow of the night, he runs out of Yoongi's with his heart in his throat and his guts at his heels.

Like a coward.

Seokjin knocks back what was left in his soju bottle and gulps the sour alcohol down his throat. "Ma'am! Another soju, please." He shouts to the stall owner, his voice is raw and rusty with disuse.

In the pojangmacha, a street bar, Seokjin sits alone. The plastic stool under him is uncomfortable, the bathroom is repulsive, half the customers are chain-smoking and the noise level is slightly below rock concert level, the whole stall has an ugly orange plastic tarp for a wall and it would shake dangerously in the cold winter wind. It wasn't the cleanest places on earth to get wasted yet there's just something comforting about this kind of stalls.

Seokjin glances at the three empty bottles on his table that he already drunk as a new unopened one is set down in front of him. The green glass is sweating droplets and glinting in the harsh halogen light; he cracks the alcohol open and pours in his shot glass till it overflows, Seokjin doesn't care as he gulps it down and idly wonders if this is how rock bottom tastes like.