| Whiskers || Yoonmin |

Ch19 ~ Clock...

"Who do you mean..." Yoongi muttered hesitantly. "...your best friend?" Yoongi had no recollection of a 'friend' in his mother's stories about their separation. She'd never mentioned who he had cheated on her with, always mentioned it was another woman but no one who had been closely connected to them like a 'best friend'.

As much as Yoongi wanted silence to loom over them on the drive home, he couldn't shake the burning dread that had been plaguing him since his father had uttered the words 'best friend'. "Dad..." Yoongi's voice shook with fear, with displeasure as he witnessed his father fall apart in the driver's seat. "...what did you do?" he tried not to sound as though he was accusing his father of something heinous, but Mr. Min wasn't giving him much of a choice.

Yoongi didn't like this. He wished his father would stop crying, it wasn't often he saw his father weep and it was almost unheard of to hear him talk as though he were dying inside trying to keep his emotions at bay. He had never been in tune with his emotions, never let his guard down or talked about himself but, today he reached his breaking point.

Yoongi remembered being a child and doing everything he could to be as strong as his father, tried to keep the tears inside his 8-year-old body as he suffered through night long arguments about 'this is all your fault!' and 'my fault?! You're the one who broke the plates trying to aim it at my head!'.

Still, his maturity closed when it was all too much to keep hidden.

"Been stressed all day..." he sobbed. "...and nothing was going right..." Yoongi could feel himself growing sick, growing unlawfully disgusted by his parent once again but for a different reason other than his repulsed attitude toward divorce. His father had never mentioned any friends, let alone a best friend when they had been living under one roof together. On the other hand, maybe he had mentioned someone like that, the boy probably blocked it out to make room for his parents' countless arguments... but still. Shouldn't Yoongi have at least seen this so called 'best friend' if he were that close to him? Even as a child he could remember names and faces like he could remember tunes and melodies, surely, he would at least recall their face.

"Yoongi?" Jimin looked worried, the 10-year-old cat suddenly noticing Yoongi's unhealthy need to bury a fistful of his fur amongst the rest of Jimin's black coat. But Yoongi didn't speak cat, he didn't understand it either so his fixation on his father could only get worse from there.

"You won't remember him..."

"H-Him...?" Yoongi tried not to gasp, because he'd convinced himself that there was nothing wrong with it but even so – the socially acceptable in South Korea was very different from that opinion. He'd spent so long assuming his father had swung one way, never even considered the other woman... to be a man.

"Him... yes..." Mr. Min said despondently. "...his name is Kang Woojin... a friend from back when I was studying for my teaching degree."

"You met him in university..." Yoongi mumbled, letting go of his iron grip on Jimin's fur. He'd relaxed a little now that he could put a name to the imaginary face he had painted in his mind. The other woman, had now grown tall and lost her breast implants as well as the tacky makeup plastered over her face. Where the woman had once sat in his head with an umbrella leaning against her shoulder, shading her face (for fear of getting smeared by the sun, despite the unhealthy weight of makeup, soaking in the bacteria of her cheeks and forehead), now stood a man. A man with strong shoulders and a smug smile, spread across his stubbled face.

God Yoongi hated him more than he should at that moment.

"That's right..." his father wiped his face dry for what seemed like the thousandth time, in order to keep the tears from falling. But every time he seemed to brush his hands on his cheeks, more tears fell relentlessly upon contact. Stubborn, as though he had exhausted the bottle he'd kept inside for so long in order to feel strong within himself. "...he and I were in the same class, back when we had taken minor courses aside from the main ones we applied for." He sniffed. "...and he was charming... he was great, and I was in uni for God's sake, I was trying to have fun and be wild because that's what you do when you're young and looking for a crazy night with a beautiful stranger..."